Mecca for Murder Read online

  “What did Mrs. Tyler want?” I asked Fawzia.

  “For me to come down to Toano. But I’m scared.”

  “Then don’t go.”

  “I’m afraid I have to. You see, Mrs. Tyler is president of the League of American Women Friends of the Near East. They donate books and things to the center. Usually Azaayim Bey does business with them personally, but he’s still in the hospital suffering from shock after what happened. Mr. Drum, are you there?”

  I said I was there.

  “I’m sure that’s why Mrs. Tyler called. I can’t say no, but I’m afraid to say yes.”

  “I usually let the client decide for himself.”

  “Then you’re accepting me as a client?” she squealed.

  “To do what?”

  “To drive to Toano this afternoon in my car. For fifty dollars.”

  “Is it a convertible?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll do it, but in my car. The top comes down.”

  “I could kiss you,” said Fawzia Totah. “The Mayflower Bar in half an hour?”

  “All right,” I said, and hung up.

  I took the elevator downstairs and picked up the latest two-bit shamus book at the lobby newsstand in case Fawzia Totah was late. The big-breasted woman on the cover stared out at you and screamed because someone was chasing her. She didn’t look anything like Fawzia.

  The top of my new De Soto convertible was already down. A couple of hot-rod kids were admiring the grillwork when I came along. They sauntered off with arrogant swaggers as if wondering how a guy like me could afford a bus like that.

  I drove the few blocks over to the Mayflower, found a parking space and went into the bar with my shamus book. I had time to drink a gin and tonic and discover the shamus book was a straight whodunit. They’re nice, but things don’t happen that way. There’s too much logic, too much intuition, too many red herrings. No shamus I ever knew can out-intuit a police department full of experts unless he’s got the inside track. So, when Fawzia Totah appeared in a fawn-colored suit, looking very trim and cool, I had another drink with her and left the shamus book for the waiter.

  We drove east along Rhode Island Avenue, which became U.S. 1 and then Henry Street across the state line in Virginia. We took Henry Street through Alexandria. Henry Street was crowded, as it always is. Fawzia Totah was pretty much silent until U.S. 1 delivered us, some two hours later, into the northern outskirts of Richmond.

  “You certainly know your way through Virginia,” she said as I turned left on Broad Street.

  “I once went to college down here,” I said, and watched her face register surprise. I played it straight. “They had a special four-year course for private eyes.”

  “Now you’re joking.”

  “Only a little. It was a law degree I wanted, so I could get into the F.B.I. I did, but too many people tried to tell me what to do. I guess it wasn’t their fault.”

  “You know, in a way you’re like Lyman Lee Tyler. He resents authority, too.”

  “In the Army?”

  “He’s a light colonel. There are more people below him than above him.”

  “West Point?”

  Fawzia offered me a look of mock horror. “Not in the Tyler family. V.M.I. But Lyman is a romantic. Are you?”

  I said I didn’t see how anyone could be a romantic these days.

  “That’s what started Davisa off against me. The fact that Limerock wanted to marry me was bad enough, but he wanted to convert to Islam, too. He didn’t know much about it, only that it was far away and tinged with mystery.”

  “Funny that Davisa didn’t quit the League of American Women Friends of the Near East.”

  “Oh, not her. She divides her life into compartments and keeps them sealed off from each other.”

  We drove through the park at the foot of Broad Street and picked up Route 60 heading southeast. Fawzia wore sun glasses and had removed the jacket of her suit. It was early afternoon now, the sun very hot and the air moisture-laden as it is in Virginia in the summer. The emancipated Negroes sat on rockers on the sagging porches of their ante-bellum clapboard houses.

  “Exactly what does Davisa want to see you about?” I asked.

  “The L.A.W.F.N.E. has some second-hand clothing for the Gaza Strip refugees, she says.”

  “Couldn’t she have had it sent?”

  “Sure. But this way she gets Suzanne and me together.”

  “Suzanne?”

  “That’s Limerock’s wife. She’s a damyankee. Davisa hates her.”

  “But she lives there?”

  “Suzanne has no family. She’s a sick girl, Mr. Drum. An alcoholic.” She smiled without humor. “You’re going to love Davisa Lee Tyler,” she said, and began to hum an Eartha Kitt song.

  We passed through corn and tobacco fields, the corn very brown and dry under the hot summer sun, rustling faintly in what little wind there was. Two miles north of Toano, Fawzia told me to turn left on a narrow black-top road. After a quarter of a mile we arrived at a pair of massive stone gate posts with no gate. Large rusted hinges clung stubbornly to one of the posts. A somewhat newer private property sign clung to the other. As we went between the posts a big black magpie flapped boldly overhead, gave us the eye and wheeled off disdainfully.

  “Are you sure somebody lives here?” I asked Fawzia.

  “Davisa is very proud. The Tylers are not as rich as they used to be, so they use the first fifty acres as a buffer zone.”

  “Is Lyman the only one with a job?”

  “Lyman’s the only child. His father is dead … Do I look scared, Mr. Drum?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m scared stiff.”

  Up ahead a rifle shot suddenly bent the still summer air.

  Chapter Five

  Beyond its buffer zone, the Tyler estate was all shaved green lawn, sculptured hedges, and ancient, immaculate white outbuildings. Tyler House itself was red brick and Georgian and rectangular, and looked as impressive as Mount Ararat rising above the flat Armenian plain. White columns served as a backdrop for the circular gravel driveway, on which were two Cadillacs; a black Fleetwood and a white convertible Eldorado.

  The rifle cracked again, and high up over the roof of Tyler House something black shattered into disappearing fragments.

  “We might as well drive around to the back,” Fawzia said, as if she really didn’t like the idea. “Davisa is skeet-shooting.”

  Gravel crunched under the De Soto’s wheels as I brought it to a stop in front of the skeet house, which was the smallest of the white outbuildings. I got out and stretched my legs. So did Fawzia.

  Another skeet came scaling up out of the skeet house. A woman wearing faded levis and a white T-shirt brought a bolt-action Springfield quickly to her shoulder, demolishing the skeet while it was still on the way up and absorbing the considerable kick of the rifle in her large, angular frame. “That will be all, Suzanne,” she said in a voice like grinding tones. “Afternoon, Fawzia.” Her eyes passed over me with the same interest that the De Soto’s hood ornament merited.

  Davisa Lee Tyler was six feet tall in buckskin loafers and if she was old enough to own a light colonel in the Army she must have been pushing sixty at least. She looked a well-preserved forty. She was lean and hard with a face as dark as an unpuckered walnut. She had broad shoulders and brought the Springfield down to order arms with precision and muscle. She was a lean-hipped and long-legged woman and her chest was as flat as Peter Pan’s.

  Lyman Lee Tyler’s wife Suzanne came uncertainly out of the skeet house into the bright glare of day. She was small and pretty, with a round face and pouting lips. Her eyes were vague and a very pale blue. She blinked too much and wouldn’t look at Fawzia. I was leaning against the De Soto’s fender half a dozen feet from her but I could smell the whisky. What her black shorts covered and her black halter halted were very nice indeed, but she was about twenty-five years old and her eyes said she was drinking herself to death.

&n
bsp; “Azaayim Bey sends his regards,” Fawzia said to Davisa Lee Tyler.

  “My condolences to him,” Davisa said, looking at her own reflection in the De Soto’s hubcap. “Lyman called earlier.”

  “From Fort Monroe?”

  “From the Islamic Center on Massachusetts Avenue, you whore. Lyman has become a Moslem.”

  “You didn’t tell me, Mother Tyler,” Suzanne said, blinking even more rapidly now. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “Really,” Fawzia said in a frightened voice. “I didn’t know he would do it.”

  “Didn’t you? Didn’t you know Lyman would become a Moslem so he could improve his chances of laying an honest-to-God belly dancer?”

  “Mother Tyler,” Suzanne wailed, and hurried into the skeet house.

  Fawzia lifted her hand but checked it in mid-air. “Why don’t you hit me?” Davisa Lee Tyler said, resting the rifle against the side of the skeet house.

  “I never made any conditions for Lyman,” Fawzia said slowly. “And I was never serious with him. I couldn’t help it if he was serious with me. I liked him. We had fun together, but nothing else. He gambles, Mrs. Tyler, but you can’t outlaw gambling. He plays around, but you can’t outlaw sex. I guess you can’t outlaw the Moslem religion, either.”

  “Lyman is taking a leave from the Army to start on the pilgrimage to Mecca next week,” Mrs. Tyler said. “I cannot blame Lyman. I blame you.”

  Suzanne came out of the skeet house unsteadily. “What’s a Moslem?” she said. “Is it bad?”

  “It’s bad for Lyman,” Davisa Lee Tyler said, and struck Fawzia Totah in the face with her clenched fist. Fawzia slammed back against the clapboard side of the skeet house and sat down. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. She looked at me reproachfully, as if this were my fault.

  I said, “Okay, lady; try a stunt like that again you’ll take a drive with me to the sheriff’s office in Toano.”

  At first I thought Mrs. Tyler hadn’t heard me. She told Suzanne to get something for Fawzia. Suzanne disappeared inside the skeet house and emerged with a bottle of Old Forester and a glass. Fawzia took a long drink and then stood up. Suzanne looked at Fawzia’s lipstick on the glass and drank from the bottle.

  “Moses!” Mrs. Tyler called.

  A very large colored man who had been lolling unseen in the shade of some plane trees ambled slowly toward us. He wore a lightweight summer tuxedo and was carrying a thick-red-bound book in his right hand. His banana-sized fingers made the book look small as a paper-bound, but it was as big as Gone With the Wind in the original edition.

  “Moses,” Mrs. Tyler said, “please throw this man off Tyler Acres.”

  Moses sighed reluctantly, stooped and put his book down carefully on the grass. He sighed again and telegraphed a left hook with the way he lifted his massive shoulder. He had an intelligent face and the saddest eyes I had ever seen. I stepped inside the left hook, which whistled around behind my ear. Had it landed, it would have deposited my head on the big book on the lawn.

  I caught the rounded satin lapels of his jacket and pulled them outward and down. A button popped. I stepped back while Moses tried to free his arms, and hit him three times in the face, twice with my left hand and once with my right. He fell heavily but got up as lithely as a cat, grinning at me.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “That’s very good, mister.”

  When he straightened all the way up he was looking at my Magnum .357. His eyes got sad again. “Aw, put that thing away,” he said. But I didn’t.

  He looked at Davisa Lee Tyler. I thought if she said so he would have tried to move in on me, Magnum and all. “That will be all, Moses,” Mrs. Tyler said. “Go inside and fix this gentleman a julep. Do you like juleps, young man?”

  Moses picked up his book and disappeared in the direction of the house. Mrs. Tyler was studying me with interest now. I could almost see little gears turning bigger gears inside her head.

  “Do you have a name, young man?”

  I told her what it was.

  “But Miss Totah can’t afford a chauffeur. Can she?”

  “She never told me. I’m a private detective.”

  “Is that so? How would you like to earn one thousand dollars?”

  “How would I have to go about earning it?”

  Instead of answering she said, “Go ahead inside, Chester. Chester Drum, is it? I like you, young man. But your julep should be ready now. I’ll see you later.”

  I looked at Fawzia, who shook her head. “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Tyler said. “I won’t hurt her now. I said I liked you.”

  I went inside after my julep.

  Moses was wheeling it toward the door on a tea cart. The julep glass was frosted solidly and, if julep glasses could, it looked like it craved company. The room was large, colonial and cluttered. There were cobbler’s benches for cocktail tables, many stiff-backed chairs, a real live harpsichord, a maple bar almost as big as the Fleetwood in the driveway, and a television set with an enormous screen.

  “Thank you, Moses,” I said, and tasted the julep.

  Moses offered me a tentative grin and stroked his jaw ruefully. “You sure can punch,” he said in a gentle voice.

  “Things always so cozy around here?”

  “The boy means a lot to Mrs. Tyler.”

  “The boy is a colonel in the Army.”

  “Perhaps I had better read my book now.”

  “Hold on, Moses. What about the lush?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Lyman Tyler does on occasion drink too much.”

  “Fawzia Totah was scared coming here. Should she have been?”

  “Mrs. Tyler has a violent temper.”

  “She’s a sixty-year-old spoiled brat, isn’t she?”

  “If you want to believe all the stories about my mistress,” Moses said quietly.

  “What are you worrying about? I’m not a reporter. I’m not a cop.”

  “You talk like a cop. I was an M.P. in the war. I know a cop when I see him.”

  “Private,” I said. “No female is good enough for Lyman, is she? Mrs. Tyler hates Suzanne as much as she hates Fawzia, doesn’t she?”

  Moses grinned at me again. “Are you planning to write a book?” he said.

  I walked to the window with my mint julep. The plane trees cast dappled patches of shadow across the lawn. Beyond them, Suzanne was sitting on her haunches in front of the skeet house with the Springfield rifle across her knees and a cleaning kit on the grass in front of her. She looked up and saw me and waved.

  When I waved back at her she called, “Doing anything important?”

  I shrugged and she said, “So come on out and keep me company. She had her sea legs, that girl. She was drunk, but from a distance you could hardly tell.

  Moses had sat down behind the bar with his book. As I passed him on the way out, I saw the title on the spine of the red volume. It was The Dialogues of Plato in the Jowett Translation. I had seen more unusual butlers than Moses, but they were in the pages of P.G. Wodehouse.

  “Lyman could do that,” Suzanne told me as I neared the skeet house.

  “Lyman could do what?”

  “Fight like you. How many men do you think could knock Moses down?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “Lyman and you is all I ever saw.”

  “Oh? Lyman has knocked Moses down?”

  “They box sometimes. You know, with sixteen-ounce gloves? Lyman likes to keep in shape.” Every time she mentioned Lyman’s name, it did something to her face.

  “I see. Moses is Lyman’s sparring partner and you’re Davisa’s gunbearer.”

  She blinked nervously and nudged the Springfield off her well-shaped knees with her elbow. The rifle clattered against the cover of the cleaning kit. “Why did you say that?”

  “Because I think you and Fawzia ought to do yourselves a favor. Why did Fawzia come here when she was afraid to? Why don’t you go someplace where Davisa won’t both
er you?”

  “I can’t answer for Miss Totah. I love my husband, Mr. Drum. Is there anything wrong with that? Can I stop loving him just because of Davisa? Oh, forget it. I’m talking too much. Davisa says I can outtalk Azaayim Bey when I get a load on. Have you met the bey? He’s a profound influence on Lyman. It’s funny, I try to tell myself his is the influence that counts, the real influence, the important influence. Not Miss Totah’s. You see?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Is she very beautiful? Sometimes it’s hard for another woman to tell.” Suzanne stood up and turned around slowly and unsteadily in a full circle. “Who’s prettier, me or Miss Totah?”

  The merchandise was very nice in both cases. Suzanne was shorter, more compact. She had a high-breasted, wasp-waisted, round-hipped body, and her legs were straight but a shade too thin. She’d have come off with at least honorable mention in any beauty contest I could think of. But I wasn’t thinking of beauty contests. I was thinking of Lyman Tyler, who could make a girl so unsure of herself she’d ask that question of a stranger.

  Before I could answer, if I was going to answer, Davisa Lee Tyler said, “Lyman always had a weakness for skinny brunettes.” She had made as much noise coming up behind me as a ping-pong ball dropped from a height of six inches into a pile of feathers. “Why don’t you go inside, Suzanne?”

  “I was talking to Mr. Drum.”

  “You were making a spectacle of yourself. Why must you always do that?”

  Suzanne bit her full lower lip. For a moment she stood there looking at her mother-in-law. It was the first long hard look I had seen those pale eyes make. If looks could kill, Davisa would have stretched out on the grass to await the embalmer.