Dead Low Tide, page 10
“Could you have smuggled a girl into your room?”
“Without any trouble, I’m afraid.”
“But Mary Eleanor has no way of knowing you stayed in Clearwater?”
“No way at all. I mentioned it to Christy. She’d have no reason to tell anybody. It isn’t what you’d call an earth-shaking hunk of information.”
He was silent for a few moments. “Well, that gives me two things to work on. One, to show that she couldn’t have been with you. Two, to find out where the hell she did go, and who she met.”
“Because whoever she met might have killed John.”
“Why? Having him around never exactly slowed her up.”
“I don’t know. It’s a hunch. Money, maybe.”
“Money from who? And why?”
“Marry Mary Eleanor right now, and you’d marry a nice thing.”
“She won’t marry anybody. She did once, and it cramped her style.”
“O.K., so I’m not making sense.”
“Anything else I could work on?”
“Work on Steve Marinak. I could use him. I’m sore at him, but that doesn’t make any difference. He’s a good trial lawyer, they tell me.”
“He is that. Right now he thinks you’re a fiend.”
“Then if you can make anything out of that Clearwater angle, use it to prove to him that she lied. And if she’d lie about that, maybe he’ll figure she lied about the rest.”
“O.K. I’ll try it.” He stood up.
“Why are you going to bat, Jack?”
He smiled. “Not for you, ducky. For the news values involved. I just want to keep this story running. It ends too quick if they elect you.” He went to the door and whooped for the jailer. He turned, and said, “Any other little thing?”
I thought of the envelope and the fractured lock. I said, “I’d like to see Christy. Think you can work that?”
“It might be rough. Can try, though.”
“Thanks. And thanks for bringing the stuff.”
I heard him walk down the corridor, heard him laugh at something the jailer said. The long sticky-hot hours went by. I read everything in the magazines, even the ads. The jailer brought me a tired lunch bought with my money. Somebody had a radio going—hillbilly hymns. Traffic moved on the main drag as though it had been drugged. Some damn kid kept ringing a bicycle bell for no apparent reason. A stupid fly kept sitting on me.
It was two-thirty when the jailer got me and led me downstairs to a small office. It had windows like mine and contained a table and six chairs. Christy sat at one of the chairs, her shoulders hunched, frowning as she dragged on a cigarette. She stood up quickly as I came in.
The jailer said, “Fifteen minutes,” and closed the door and left us alone in there. It was just a little too neat and too cooperative.
I held Christy in my arms and she started crying, saying, “Oh, God, Andy. I messed everything up. I messed everything up.”
“Honey, I can only hold onto you with one arm, because they took my belt and I have to hold my pants up.”
She started to giggle through the tears and it had a thin little hysterical sound in it. I said, “Whoa, baby. You did what you thought was best. I’m not mad.” And I put my lips close to her ear, and said, “I hope you have a pencil and paper.”
She caught on, went to her purse, and opened it. She had an address book and one of those pint-sized ballpoint pens. I took them, and said heartily, “Well, tell me how things are.”
She began to prattle on about how Elly felt and how Ardy Fowler felt and how they and nearly everybody else out there were pulling for me and saying it was all some kind of a dirty frame-up. I showed her what I had written. It said, “M.E.L. gave me keys, requested I search J.L.’s desk for brown 8 by 11 envelope stolen from her, addressed to her. Desk lock broken. Don’t know who.”
She nodded, and I said, “Well, it’s nice to know somebody is pulling for me.”
I motioned to her to keep talking, which she did. And I wrote, “Outside door O.K. Maybe new girl. Remember something funny there?” She was talking and reading over my shoulder and she squeezed my shoulder to indicate she understood what I meant.
“Snuggle up to her,” I wrote. “Pry around.”
I looked up at her and she nodded as she kept on talking. I tore the page out of her book and ate it. That faint hint of coldness in Jack Ryer had made me decide that it would be a lot better to trust Christy with this new factor.
I kissed her and she clung and said she was sorry all over again and I told her to hush up, and finally got her smiling. Tentatively, but at least smiling. A nice big bundle of girl. Big and brown and warm. Her eyes were a little puffy, but she looked good in her white skirt and green blouse, so I kissed her again, and the man knocked on the door and came in.
“Got to take you back,” he said.
She asked me if I needed anything, and I said I better have something to read, and she said she could fix that. I watched her swing down the hall toward the stairs, and then I went back up to my hotbox.
Some fat historical novels arrived an hour later. Ten minutes after they arrived I was in the middle of a hot sword fight and the heroine was lashed to a gun carriage, and her dress was torn just enough, like on the dust jacket of the book, so that you could see her truly awe-inspiring breasts. And, aye, she was a torrid, hot-blooded wench, a fit companion for my dark, thrilling handsomeness.
I was slowly but surely driving Baron Von Schteygel toward the ship’s rail when Wargler came in and plumped himself down on my chair, curled his finger along his forehead, and snapped sweat onto my cell floor.
“What were you looking for in John’s desk, son?” he asked.
“Why don’t you go get your tapes and do it right?”
“Ran out of tapes. But there’ll be more coming.”
“I accept your apology. Do you think I broke his desk open?”
“Who else?”
“Go look in that envelope full of my junk. One batch of keys isn’t mine. They’re John Long’s. I busted open the desk because I was too lazy to find the right key. Now go away, pretty please.”
“Where’d you get his keys?”
“I tore them from the little pink helpless hand of a sobbing woman.”
When I looked up from the book again he was still there. After a while he went away. I didn’t miss him a bit. Five minutes later the Baron was in the drink and the triangular fins of the merciless demons of the deep were cutting toward him.
Ten
MY FIRST VISITOR Monday morning came at ten. It was Steve Marinak. He wore what was, for him, a subdued shirt. A little candy-striped number in seersucker. His red face was creased with lines of fatigue and embarrassment.
I was well into my second historical novel. This heroine was even more astonishing in a mammiferous sense. I tossed it aside and didn’t get up. The cell door closed behind him. He trudged over and glared down at me.
“All right. All right. Do you want a lawyer?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet, Steve.”
“I’ll make it up for you. You want a lawyer.”
“Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t want you.”
“I don’t blame you. O.K., I was a damn fool. I’m supposed to believe in the laws of evidence. So I run with the pack, yelping for your blood. Remember, John was one of my best friends.”
“I sort of liked him myself.” I linked my hands behind my head and smiled blandly up at him.
“Can I be your lawyer?”
“Please?”
“O.K. Please.”
I stuck my hand up and he took it, almost shyly. He said, “Good. Some things you do, you don’t get a chance to settle the account. This time I get a chance.”
“What changed your mind?”
“A chat with Ryer. Hell of a chat. At first you could have heard us as far south as Placida. Finally I stopped yelling and started listening. Then I talked to Mary Eleanor on the phone. You stayed with her in some little old hotel in Tampa and she was too upset to remember how you registered or the name of it, even. And then I phoned the Blue Vista Courts and they read the name on the register for the twenty-third, including the license number of your car. That made the first hole. Jack’s logic widened it: That boy should have been a lawyer.” Steve sat down.
“What do we do now?”
“You tell me every last damn thing you know about this whole thing. Everything. Every bit.”
“Maybe I’d rather stay here. Maybe I’m getting a nice rest.”
He jumped up. “Stop grinning like a damn idiot. Don’t you know these people are all ready to crucify you? Get it in your head that this is serious. The prosecuting attorney has been over the evidence. He’s about ready to approve a first-degree charge. He’s a shrewd guy and it seems to satisfy him, and there isn’t much time, because once these things get set up for trial, it’s damn hard to make anybody back water.”
“Relax. Sit down. I’ll tell you the whole thing.”
It took a long time. He asked questions, interrupting me from time to time. They were pertinent questions. He made me go over conversations. I gave him every last little detail. Then he got up and paced around. He slapped the wall with his palm and paced around some more.
“Here’s one angle. We’ve got to offer an alternative. We can make her look bad, catching her up in that lie. We can make everything slant as though he was afraid she was going to kill him, to get her freedom. That would be something he couldn’t fight. And we can show that she had a chance to find out you don’t lock your house, find that thing hanging in the garage. We can show that she wrapped you all up, and practically put an apple in your mouth. And Ryer told me enough—and I already knew enough anyhow—so we can show her up for the nasty little nympho she is.”
“Only one flaw in that. I can’t quite believe it.”
“Why not? The more I think of it, the better I like it. She came to you with a phony investigation she wanted you to perform. I tell you we’ve got to get them off on some other scent, some other possibility, good or bad, to get you out of here.”
“I still don’t want an innocent person to get stuck.”
He sat down again. His voice was gentle. “Before I came here a long time ago, Andy, before I came down and passed the Florida bar and started a practice here, I was a smart young assistant in the District Attorney’s office in—well, where it happened doesn’t make any difference. I got my big chance in a murder trial. The man handling it took sick. I took over in mid-trial. I got the jury just where I wanted them, and I got the verdict I wanted, the verdict the whole office wanted because it was cruel, vindictive, premeditated murder, as callous as anything you ever expect to see. They electrocuted the guy. A real unwholesome-type guy. He yelped about innocence right up until they put the hood on him. I was so young I even wanted to see it. I was so young I was proud of myself. Eight months afterward, in connection with another case, we received a confession in such detail, containing things that hadn’t even come out in the trial, that we knew we’d made a little slip. We’d sort of accidentally electrocuted the wrong fella. My friends slapped me on the back and told me it was tough luck, could have happened to anyone. I kept seeing the way my pigeon had stiffened when the current hit him. I saw that picture a lot of times, and through the bottoms of a lot of glasses. And finally I knew I’d have to do my straightening out some other place, so I came down here. And so I know it is childish and stupid to keep thinking that innocence will out. It will, usually. But any man can be an exception.”
I waited in the long hot silence, and then I said, “O.K., Steve. I’ll take this seriously.”
“You better.”
The jailer fumbled with the door, and Wargler came in. Steve said, “Bob, I thought you told me I could have all the time I wanted.”
Wargler didn’t even seem to hear him. He looked dumb and numbed and baffled and faintly sick. He said, “Son, shove over. I got to sit down a minute.”
He sat down and we stared at him. He cracked his big knuckles. “What’s wrong?” Steve demanded.
Wargler stirred and looked at him. “I guess maybe we’ll let this boy go, come to think of it.”
“How come?” I asked, wondering why the skin on the back of my neck had started to crawl.
“Well, dead low tide come about quarter to ten this morning. It’s a slow tide right now, and those Hoover brothers, they like to net in the pass right on the tide change. They got to move fast and catch it just right, because if the tide starts to come in on ’em, they can lose a lot of net. They made the swing and they start drawing the circle tight against the Horseshoe Key side of the pass and they come up with a body. They rush it right in and get hold of me, and to hell with the fish. Strangled. I can tell that right off. Strangled and tossed in the channel in the bay someplace, and tossed in, I guess, five minutes earlier and it would have gone right through the pass and out into the Gulf.”
He turned to me and he laid his hand on my knee with a surprising gentleness. “It was that big girl, son. That Hallowell girl. That big blonde works over to Wilburt’s.”
I guess I stood up. Anyway, I got over to the window somehow, and I was looking down through the diamond pattern at the main drag, at the sun winking on the parked cars. Monday morning and the town had a more purposeful look than yesterday, yet there was still a look of marking time about it. The sticky summer, the lack of tourists. Two little girls, too young for school, were walking hand in hand down the sidewalk, lapping delicately with their tongues at tall pink ice-cream cones.
There was a picture of Christy, gold-molten in the sun, on that afternoon of love and laughter. Afternoon of the shared cigarette. And Christy, sitting on my kitchen table, brown knees greased with Ray-pell. Christy’s lips and her tears, and that thin, shy, metallic voice coming over Wargler’s machine. When we’d had the glooms, we’d helped each other. She liked gin, and fine piano, and lots of sun.
I’d walked her right into it. I’d walked her throat into whatever had closed around it. Big, casual, vibrant, unself-conscious body, drifting down the channel, bumping along the bottom in the tide current, turning with hair afloat in the current, startling the little fishes into quick darts of silver.
I put my fists on the high sill of the window and ground my eyes down against my fists until the world was full of flashing greens and purples. But I couldn’t rub her out of my eyes or out of my heart. It was a hell of a time to find out that I had loved her.
Finally I became aware of a hand on my shoulder. I turned and it seemed to take long seconds to recognize Steve.
He said, “I told Bob some of the other stuff, and he says it’s O.K. to leave. Want to get out of here?”
“O.K. to leave?”
“Yes. Come on.”
Seemingly without transition, I was standing in the Chief’s office, threading my belt through the loops. I sat down and worked the laces into my shoes. I think Steve walked with me for a while as I headed for my car. I think he was trying to tell me something or ask me something. I don’t know what it was. Then he was gone and I sat in the car wondering why it wouldn’t start. I looked in through the big plate-glass window. The office was empty. I found my keys finally and put the ignition key in the switch. I didn’t want to go look at her. I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t want to find out where she was. I didn’t want to see, on her face, that look of remote dignity and humility I had seen on John Long’s face. Christy was gone and there was no purpose in looking at what was left. The strong golden body was empty of her now. That body had given her pain and given her pleasure. I had seen her going down a corridor, with a strong swing of round brown legs and a swirl of skirt, and the look of her blonde hair against the green blouse and her quick parting look as she reached the end of the corridor.
I got the stubborn car started and drove back through the noon sunshine to my place, not looking at where Christy had lived as I went by. I parked and went through to the bedroom, stripped off the clothes, which had a jail smell on them, and lay across my bed.
No smart chatter, Andy boy? No winsome remarks? No banter at all? Come on. Make with the gay philosophies, the witty sayings, I thought.
It had been under my nose and I hadn’t known it. Under my nose, and I had never realized I was that unknown guy walking around shot with luck.
So I cried. Shut my teeth on my wrist and cried. Like for candy they took away. Like for no more Saturdays. Like for bright life going like a train into a gray tunnel. It pulled all my nerve ends out through my skin and left me for dead. I slept then.
Something goes wrong and usually you sleep and wake up and at first you are aware that the world is not right, and you try to think what, and it all comes breaking over you like a wave. But it wasn’t like that this time. I had gone to sleep with the clean knowledge of loss. It was with me while I slept. And I woke up instantly aware of the precise extent of my loss.
When I woke up it was three-thirty and Jack Ryer was standing by my bed, hands on his hips, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I moved my legs over and he sat down on the corner of the foot of the bed, eyes steady.
“How are you making it?”
“Not good.”
“You don’t look good. I wouldn’t want to run into those eyes in a dim alley.”
“Does it show that much?”
“Enough so I’m telling you to watch it. Let Wargler operate. He has his dull moments. At times he’s a little childish. But he eventually gets where he’s going. Right now he wants to know where she was tossed in. Time of death was between midnight and two this morning. Slow tides, and he’s been working it out and figuring, and he is pretty sure she could have been dumped in the creek right here at about twelve-thirty and ended up in the pass right at dead low tide. He knows the area and the waters better than you or I will ever know them. I came out with him. He and George are questioning everybody who lives at this layout, one at a time. When you feel like it, he wants you over there.”
