It's a Sin to Kill by Day Keene Page B

Charlie.”
    Ames walked back down the pier. Mary Lou walked beside him, dabbing at her eyes from time to time with the backs of her hands, sobs still shaking her shoulders. “It happened just as I told it, Charlie.”
    â€œI know,” Ames said.
    Ben Sheldon was standing in the doorway of the sleeping quarters adjoining his office. His feet were bare. His only garment was a pair of wrinkled pajama pants. His eyes were puffed with sleep. His fat belly hung over the draw string of his pajama pants.
    â€œWhat you doin’ out heah this early, Bob?” he asked White.
    White jerked his thumb up the basin. “Hit would seem someone else is daid up t’ the Camden place.” He started to get into the cruiser and looked over his shoulder at the fat man. “You hear any commotion out on the pier last night, Ben?”
    â€œNo. Not ary.”
    â€œYou didn’t hear a woman scream?”
    The chandler shook his head. “No. I didn’t hear a thing, Bob.”
    Sheriff White settled himself in the back seat of the car and looked sideways at Mary Lou.
    She stopped crying and said fiercely, “I didn’t have time to scream.”
    â€œDrive to the Camden place,” White told the driver.
    It was full morning now. The mist was lifting. The sun rising out of the mangrove swamp on the far side of the bay was drying the condensation on the Camden lawn and streaking the private pier with yellow.
    The usual morbid crowd had gathered. Sheriff White sat a moment after the police car had stopped, picking out individuals on the pier. He could see Camden and Ferris and Phillips. Mixed in with the local people he knew were a dozen or more tourists, the men in bathing trunks, the women in bathing or play suits. A fat woman with flabby white legs, wearing tight yellow shorts and a halter, was leaning over the hand rail looking at something in the water.
    â€œYou know,” White told Keely. “The beach used to be a nice place to live until the tourists and the moneyed snow birds loused it up. Now it’s one damn thing after another.” He got out and held the door open for Ames. “Okay. Let’s go, Charlie.”
    The kettle drums of fatigue were beginning to play a tympanic solo in Ames’s head. He hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. He’d been under a constant strain. He’d been questioned incessantly. He’d been moved from one place to another and then back to the place he’d been first. “Okay. Let’s go, Charlie” had become his theme song. Now, with a new angle on which to work, with a possible solution in sight, Sheriff White had decided not to believe Mary Lou.
    The muscles in Ames’s neck corded. The large veins in his temples began to throb. His jaw thrust out at a stubborn angle.
To hell with them
, he thought.
To hell with all of them!
Cocking his white captain’s cap at as jaunty an angle as he could manage, with Mary Lou at his side, swaggering slightly as he walked, Ames preceded White and Keely and Gilmore out on the pier.

Chapter Nine
    F ERRIS TURNED from the rail and nodded begrudging approval as Sheriff White forced his way through the group of curious onlookers staring at the object in the water.
    â€œI must say,” the lawyer said, “you got here promptly. We found the body less than ten minutes ago.”
    â€œI was jist down the road apiece,” White said.
    Hal Camden was standing beside the lawyer. He no longer looked like a movie actor. He needed a shave. His eyes were puffed and bloodshot. His expensive silk robe was rumpled. The legs of his pajamas showed under the cuffs of trousers pulled on so hastily he’d forgotten to zip the fly. His over-long hair needed combing. He exuded an aroma of whiskey. “I don’t know why,” he said plaintively, “everything happens to me.”
    White ignored him to look over the rail.
    Mary Lou gasped, “It’s the maid. It’s