She called me a string of names so foul that even Fred blushed.
Fred turned her over to his boys who took her away in the sedan. He shoved his hat back. “Burns, my lad, that is a rugged dish. Leave us partake of a beer.”
Over the beer I told him how it had shaped up. Schaegan had been working his way up in the syndicate when she had come into his life. Some of this, of course, was guesswork, but we proved it later. She was good businesswoman. She had advised Schaegan so well that within a year they were the big guns in the syndicate. He grew to defer more and more often to her judgement. She had him right around her little finger. She was the real boss, and stayed in the background. He was front man.
They smelled the tax boys closing in and she developed a plan. They delayed their payoffs until they had accumulated a good package. Some of it was theirs, but a large slice of it was money that had to be paid out if they were to stay in business.
They made a swing around the country while she planted large wads of the money here and there, under assumed names, faked credentials. Apparently Schaegan was too much taken with her to get suspicious of her planting the money where only she could get at it.
Schaegan had been necessary to pull the caper, but his usefulness was at an end. She got in touch with the one called Stevie, and had asked him to come down and do a job on Schaegan. With Schaegan dead, no one would be able to hook her up with the boss job in the syndicate.
Stevie had arrived before I had, and he was waiting around, staying out of Schaegan’s sight, waiting for Beth to set the stage properly. My showing up was a complication. She saw that I might make the best way of getting back to the states and getting out of sight. But Schaegan had to be out of the way. I moved too fast. She sent Stevie up to the cottage to knock me out and kill Schaegan. When she arrived Schaegan wasn’t dead. He was talking. And I was listening.
So she did both jobs at once.
Fred, on the other side of the booth, frowned at me. “It seems to fit, Burns, but how the hell did you catch on?”
“I didn’t get it until Schaegan was dead. And then a few things clicked. The only place Stevie could have gotten the gun was out of that big straw shoulder-bag Beth took down to the pool. And in her Mississippi girlhood she had learned to be a good shot. She forgot that I knew that from our early amusement-park evenings. At a distance of nine feet, she could hardly kill Schaegan by accident.”
“You think she would have married you?”
“Certainly. And one fine day when the heat was off, she would have gone.”
Fred sighed. “I’m always after grubby little characters that don’t wash and speak baritone. What sort of luck do you have to have to go after a dish like Beth?”
I couldn’t answer that. But if Bill had attended the hearing sixty days later, he wouldn’t have been as intrigued.
Beth had gained twenty pounds on the starchy prison food. Her dead-white face was bloated and puffy. She made a full confession in a flat, monotonous voice without once looking toward me.