Severed Key Page 5

  “I got it. I got it. Only I’m classified unfit for service. Physically unfit. I got this trouble with my leg. The right one’s shorter than the left one. It’s been like that ever since I broke it when I was ten. It don’t show when I wear boots.”

  When Franzen turned back to Travis Dean, the boy drew himself to attention and saluted.

  “Private First Class Dean, sir!” he said crisply. “Eight months in Vietnam. Honourable discharge. You got my papers in your hand, sir. Go ahead. Look. You ain’t gonna bust a Vietnam veteran for legal parking on the shoulder, are you, sir? All we was tryin’ to do was figure which road would take us to the beach. We got a little cold beer and some weiners, and we thought we’d have us a picnic because this is Monday and the Sombrero Café don’t open on Monday, sir.”

  By this time Simon was grinning at Franzen’s discomfort.

  “It seems the veteran has a point,” he said. “And the Sombrero does close on Monday.”

  “All right!” Franzen snapped. “What about you, Dean? Where do you work?”

  “Different places,” the boy said. “I was a truck mechanic in the service and I got my own tools. I pick up work when I need it. I only been out of uniform a couple of months, so I figure to see me some of this great land I helped save from the Communists eight thousand miles away. You just can’t ever tell when those coolies are going to head their sampans for San Diego, sir. Well, so I seen Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate, and then I run into Bob and Sunny. One of these days I’ll find me a chick like Sunny and get me a good mechanic’s job. I’ll make some bread and buy my own garage, and then I’ll buy me an agency and sell Cadillacs to all those Country Club types. Maybe I’ll go into politics then and get to be a Congressman because I’m such a hero. I fought them dirty Communists before they could mobilize their sampans—”

  “Oh, shut up!” Franzen ordered, pushing the wallet into the boy’s hand. “Take the road that goes under the viaduct and you’ll come out on the beach, but it’s patrolled, soldier, so don’t try any funny stuff or start any fires—and get off the beach by ten p.m. or you’ll be run off.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Travis saluted smartly once more and climbed into the van. When Bob was in the front seat beside him, he started the motor and edged slowly back into the stream of highway traffic. Franzen glared at Simon’s grin.

  “Okay, so now I’m a pig,” he said. “You wouldn’t be smiling like that if you had a couple of teenagers you were trying to steer through high school and college without getting their brains knocked out with LSD or washed out with some ‘new morality’ kick. Do you think I like playing the heavy? You want my job?”

  “No, thanks,” Simon said. “I have troubles of my own.”

  “Sure, you do. Wheeling and dealing with those gilt-edged clients on the borderline of embezzlement. How’s the engagement coming?”

  “The engagement’s going,” Simon said. “In about two weeks I’ll be taking those eternal vows.”

  “Good! That’s what you need—a wife. A family.” Franzen walked over to the XKE and eyed it admiringly. “You’ll be trading this for a station wagon before long. How fast will it go, anyway?”

  “Faster than anything with a white door.”

  “I know. I’ve been on accident detail and seen a few victims scraped off the windshield. Use your seat belts, Simon. The life you save may be only that of a fast-talking lawyer, but I still get sick at the sight of blood.”

  The van was now dropping from view under the viaduct. Franzen followed it with his eyes. “Pig!” he muttered. “Isn’t that a beautiful thing to call a man who spends all his waking hours trying to keep people from destroying themselves?”

  The van moved away from the highway and took a two-lane road that ran parallel to the beach. When it came to an acre or more of parking space, deserted now because the weekend holiday was over, Travis steered into the area and drove all the way to the extreme end before parking. Switching off the ignition, he turned around and addressed the girl in the rear of the van.

  “There’s a sand bar at the foot of the stairs yonder,” he said. “You get on down there with the blanket. Bob and me will bring the eats and the beer.”

  Sunny was a gentle soul who was accustomed to following directions without question. She picked up a folded army blanket and the transistor radio and climbed out of the van. The radio began to play even before she reached the stairs. Bob and Travis watched her from the front seat.

  “That was scary back there with the man,” Bob said.

  Travis nodded. “We’re lucky the citizen came along. Hey, he must be some wheel the way he talked to Lawman.”

  “And did you see that XKE he was driving? That’s money! No wonder he wasn’t afraid of the man.”

  “That’s what I been telling you!” Travis said. “Money. Bread. An’ we got more than that citizen, I’ll bet. But you want to turn it in—”

  Bob waved him to silence. Sunny had reached the steps to the beach. She looked back at the van and beckoned.

  “We’re coming!” Travis yelled. Sunny nodded and moved on out of sight.

  “We’ve got to tell her,” Bob said. “She was the one who found the suitcase.”

  “No! We can’t tell her! Jesus, can’t you think at all! Does that leg short all the way to your brain? You can’t tell Sunny what we found in the suitcase. Chicks talk!”

  “But when we spend the money she’ll know.”

  “If we spend it here everybody will know! We got to split. We got to go to Brazil. There’s some kind of law there so nobody can ever send us back if we don’t want to come. We got to split and meet in Brazil.” “Who takes the money?”

  “We divide the money. We go to Brazil at different times and from different places. We hide the money someway in our luggage. I got to think—”

  Travis got out of the van and opened the rear door. A carton of beer and a sack of weiners and buns were on the floor of the vehicle. Next to them—under a canvas bedroll—was the blue suitcase Sunny had found on the beach. Travis pushed aside the bedroll and opened the suitcase. Bob leaned over the front seat and watched as the contents came into view. One-hundred-dollar notes. Stacks and stacks of one-hundred-dollar notes. It was all there—just the way it had been when Travis first cracked the lock on the suitcase.

  “We never did get it all counted,” Bob said. “We stopped at ninety thousand when Sunny came out to the van last night.”

  “There must be ten times that much,” Travis said. “There must be a million dollars in that suitcase.”

  “A million! But it belongs to somebody. It has to belong to somebody.”

  “Sure—the dame on the boat, like you said. Then Sunny found it on the beach, you picked it up, I opened the lock—that makes it ours by rights. It’s called ‘treasure trove’. I read about it in a book.”

  Travis had a convincing way of saying things he wasn’t sure about, but Bob was still sceptical. “If it’s ours by right,” he argued, “why can’t we spend it?”

  “Because nobody would believe we found it on the beach, stupid! You saw the way the man acted back there on the highway. You want to explain to him how you found a million dollars in a pile of seaweed? For that you need a big mouthed lawyer—Hey, wait a minute! I’m gettin’ an idea. Remember that cat with the steel rims we met in San Francisco? What was his name?”

  “Morry something,” Bob said. “Morry Sacks.”

  “That’s it! He had printed cards he gave to everybody. I got one somewhere in this wallet if the man didn’t steal it—Yeah, here it is: ‘Morry Sacks, Attorney-at-Law.’ That’s it! That’s how we get to Brazil.”

  “Morry Sacks is going to tell the law we found a million dollars on the beach?”

  “No! Morry is too small potatoes—besides, he’s got a habit. Couldn’t you see that? A man with a habit needs money even more than we do.” Travis shoved the wallet back into his pocket again and took one of the hundred-dollar notes from the suitcase. He stretched
it out, snapped it and held it to the light. “How many of these do you see around?” he challenged. “Maybe it’s even counterfeit. Wouldn’t that be something? Go all the way to South America and find out the loot’s no good. But here’s what we do. You write a letter to this Morry Sacks and tell him to write you a letter on stationery with his name printed on like this card. The letter says that your aunt died and left you some money, only she was a little crazy and everything she had was in cash. About a week later, he writes another letter and inside is about ten—no, make it twelve—of these bills. Only he just writes the hundred-dollar bills are inside, see. We put them inside when the letter comes. Then you go to the bank with the letters and the money and open an account.”

  “And if the money’s no good?”

  “Then your poor old aunt was nuttier than anybody thought.”

  “What if Morry doesn’t want to write the letters?”

  “For one of these bills? You tell him he gets a hundred dollars when he writes the letters and they won’t be able to fly the planes fast enough with the mail!”

  It sounded good the way Travis told it, but Bob still looked worried. “I don’t know,” he said. “I keep thinking that somebody is looking for this money. Maybe there’s a reward—”

  “A reward!” Travis screamed. “A hundred bucks—” He waved the note under Bob’s nose. “This is what they give you for a reward! Listen to me, Bobby boy. I killed people, see? In ‘nam I killed people I never seen before and for no reason but because they got in front of my rifle. Once you kill one, it gets easier. For this money—for my share of a million bucks—I tell you I would kill and it would be so easy I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  Travis Dean’s mouth had formed a silly smile, but his eyes weren’t smiling at all. He wasn’t bluffing. Bob watched a Travis he had never seen before smooth the hundred-dollar bill and replace it inside the suitcase. He closed the lid and snapped the lock, and then began carefully arranging the bedroll over the suitcase the way it had been before they parked.

  “When you get the money deposited in the bank,” he continued quietly, “we wait a few weeks and then we split. I think you and Sunny go back to San Francisco and leave for Brazil from there—”

  “I’m going to marry Sunny,” Bob said suddenly.

  Travis looked surprised. “I thought you already were married.”

  “That was a hippie marriage. I mean really married—with a licence.”

  Travis reflected on the idea. “Yeah, that’s smart,” he said. “If anything goes wrong anywhere along the line, a wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that! I was thinking about the way that lawman talked about her—community chick! I don’t like anybody talking about Sunny that way!”

  “You’re tender-hearted,” Travis said. “You remind me of this real tender-hearted guy in my outfit overseas. He kept tryin’ to make friends with the gooks. He’d give them cigarettes—but first he’d read to them this thing on the package where it says ‘Caution: cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.’ He got blown up, finally, by a ten-year-old kid with a bomb. Okay, you marry Sunny for whatever reason you want. When it’s time to split, I’ll sell my van and go to Tucson, or someplace. We fly south at the same time from different places. I’ll figure out some way to hide the money in our luggage so we don’t have to bribe too many people when we land.”

  The suitcase was completely covered now. Travis picked up the carton of beer and handed it to Bob just as Sunny reappeared at the top of the steps to the beach.

  “Hey, what’s with you guys?” she called.

  The hardness disappeared from Travis’s eyes. He swung towards her waving the picnic sack in his hand. “We’re coming,” he yelled. “Bob had to go—”

  “Hey, that’s not true!” Bob protested.

  “It will be as soon as you drink a beer. I’ve seen you drink beer before. Okay, let’s lock up the van and get down there. We can see it from the sand bar. Anybody even comes near this bus and I’m yellin’ like a Comanche. A million! Jesus! I’ll bet there really is a million dollars in that suitcase!”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE AMBER LIGHTS circling the great arc of the Century Plaza glowed gayly against the darkening sky when Simon left the Jaguar in the care of an attendant in a beefeater’s uniform and strode into the lobby. Inside the doorway, he paused to glance at his wristwatch. He was a few minutes early and was about to look for a telephone to call Hannah at the beach when a porter in a mandarin-type jacket approached.

  “Please, you are Simon Drake?”

  Simon looked surprised and the porter’s face expanded in a wide smile.

  “I was told to watch for a man who walks as if he was still driving his XKE,” he explained. “If you are Simon Drake, Mr Keith has already gone down to the Hong Kong bar. He said he was thirsty.”

  “I’m Simon Drake and Mr Keith always is thirsty,” Simon said. He handed the porter a bill and took the escalator down to the lower level. Approaching the bar, he could hear the low, gut beat of an excellent jazz combo. Inside the bar, he paused long enough for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness surrounding the stage at the far end of the room. While he waited, one tall shadow detached itself from the cluster of shadows at the bar and came to meet him glass in hand.

  “What are you drinking?” Keith queried. “Plain booze or something with a gardenia floating in it?”

  “Scotch rocks will do nicely,” Simon said.

  Keith relayed the order to the bartender and appropriated one of the tables facing the stage.

  “You made good time,” he said, “and you’re wearing a tie.”

  “You look garrotted yourself,” Simon said.

  Keith scowled and tugged at his four-in-hand. “Barbaric custom,” he admitted, “but they set a very fancy table in the Granada Room. Whenever I’m flying this high, I come down here to catch the early show.”

  A raven-haired waitress appeared out of the shadows and deposited Simon’s drink on the table. Keith put a note on the tray and watched admiringly as she walked away. Her waist was no more than twenty-two inches and her pelvis action, bouncing at the rhythm of the jazz piano, was accentuated by a skin-hugging mandarin sheath.

  “And you’ve always had a weakness for Asiatic types,” Simon recalled.

  Keith snapped his fingers. “Now, that’s what I forgot! I didn’t check back with that lovely lady at the LAX auto rental booth. Too busy doing homework.”

  “Homework?”

  “Research—on the other lovely, Sigrid Thorsen. If the lady came in a week ahead of schedule, as broken-hearted Arne Lundberg told the press, she was either descending on him without so much as a telegram or she had someplace else to go for that week—like a hotel.”

  “Like the Century Plaza?”

  “It turned out that way, yes. This is where a reservation was being held in her name. It was made three days ago by Trans-America Tours in New York City….”

  “Pretty posh accommodations for a TV starlet,” Simon reflected.

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking—and especially when her husband-to-be was toiling away as a truck driver to raise the scratch for a honeymoon nest. Of course, some girls get squeamish as they approach the altar. She might have wanted a last taste of glamour before moving into the suburban tract set. But do you know who else is registered here? The lad in the ice cream suit who was waiting at the airport for Angie Cerva.”

  “Johnny Sands?”

  “Right. I saw him this afternoon at the pool. He’s even prettier in swimming trunks.”

  The Scotch was excellent even if the dialogue was puzzling. Simon drank deeply and then put down his glass. “Jack,” he said, “I’ve had a long, long drive this day to and from San Diego and thence to this oh, so hush-hush meeting. I’m in no mood for hankie panky. Are you on a case and need legal advice, or is this just another wild guess like your identification of the lawmen watching Cerva at t
he airport Saturday? It so happens that I was introduced to both of the gentlemen at lunch today. They are not policemen; they are members of the Atomic Energy Commission attending a seminar—”

  “Hold it!” Keith ordered. “Look what’s happening on the podium.”

  What was happening was in the way of an eviction. The pianist had completed his number and taken his bows. Now he was being jovially ejected from the piano bench by an energetic young man with a familiar smile. It was Johnny Sands, sartorially splendid in a ruffled bullfighter’s shirt, a bright blue tuxedo jacket and tight black trousers. He sat down before the keyboard and began to play. His style was easy and distinctive. The back-up band caught the rhythm and came in softly as the melody progressed.

  “Speaking of the devil,” Keith mused. “Hey, Johnny Sands likes the spotlight, doesn’t he?”

  “He’s good,” Simon said.

  “He’s better than good. He must have slipped the pro. a nice piece of change to get away with this.”

  “According to Hannah Lee, he has a nice piece of change,” Simon remarked. He explained to Keith the reasoning behind Hannah’s surprising identification of Sands’ photograph in the Sunday Times and watched the reaction set in.

  “Raul Sandovar,” Keith reflected. “Didn’t some reporter label him ‘The Bloody Butcher of the Caribbean?’ He was gunned down by a squad led by his best friend, if I remember my Latin dictators.”

  “Never trust a best friend in a revolution,” Simon said. “I think you’re right.”

  “Then Johnny Sands—Juan Sandovar—would be the child Raul’s widow took to Switzerland where he had banked a fortune. Wow! He is loaded. He can play my piano anytime!”

  While the recital continued, Simon took the cuticle case from his coat pocket and opened it out on the table. He removed the severed key and handed it to Keith.

  “What do you make of this?” he asked.

  Keith examined the key and read the inscription on the tag.

  “Was this in the case all the time?” he asked.

  “That’s where I found it. Hannah thinks it’s a romantic souvenir—some kind of love symbol. I was thinking of taking it to Arne Lundberg—”