It is, as they keep saying, a sport involving body contact. If I was casting the T.V. series, I would put myself in as the big dumb ugly assistant to the brilliant hero, the comedy relief who bungles the simplest orders, but comes through with the muscle in the clutch. The weight is still at two hundred fifteen, but it requires work and thought to keep it there, and I often wonder why I bother. An automatic reflex in the pride department, perhaps.
The long minutes went by. Kids came out of the drugstore and drove away. Replacements arrived.
Finally a curious thing happened. The stodgy little black Renault turned in and went chugging across the great expanse of empty parking area. It gave one irritable bleat of the horn. Charlie was already on his way toward it. It had stopped thirty feet from the phone booth.
I didn’t begin to actually believe it until he had gotten into the little car and it had started up again. She had bought it way back when we had been together. She had driven out to the cottage with it many many times.
I wanted to know what right Charlie had to bring Sis Gantry into the picture. I didn’t have to ask myself why she’d let herself be sucked in. Anything with a broken wing would get her immediate attention.
Suddenly I knew it was my fault. I had told Charlie of her blind belief in his innocence. He had needed someone for some service I either couldn’t handle, or he had decided I wouldn’t handle. He had been sorting over the people he knew, wondering who to ask. And I had handed him Sis on a platter.
“Goddamn you, Charlie Haywood,” I muttered, and swung around into amateur pursuit. The streets of Florence City are too empty on any given night in August. I knew Charlie would be alert for any sign of a car following them. And I knew both of them would know my wagon, Sis particularly.
It helped a great deal to have them head directly for the causeway and City Bridge. Horseshoe Key is five miles long and in all its length it is seldom over a quarter-mile wide. Orange Road is the paved road that extends the full length of the Key. The commercial strip takes up most of a mile, right in the middle of the Key opposite the bridge and including the Orange Beach section. If you turn right when you get onto the Key, you head north through the junkier part of the commercial section, and then through an area of cottages and beach houses set too close together, until the road ends at the North Pass Public Beach. If you turn south you pass stores, bars, restaurants, and than a batch of pretentious motels with pretentious names, and suddenly you are in the land of the Large Money, the big homes you can’t see from the road, and you can read all the neat signs that say No Stopping, No Trespassing, No Deep Breathing. There is a barricade and a turnaround at the end. In the summer you can risk parking there and walking out along a narrowing sandpit to a good place to cast out into Horseshoe Pass after mackerel and blues. But if you try it in the winter season, you can find your car expensively ticketed.
I hung well back and didn’t speed up until I saw the Renault turn left. When I made the turn the road was empty. No small ruby taillights. The road was straight for so far, I knew they had ducked off, and I would have had a lot of trouble learning where—had I not seen too much light coming out of Tom Earle’s office.
I slowed down and as I went by, saw the two of them walking from the front door back toward Tom’s private office. Evidently they had just walked in and she had clicked on the additional light a moment before I saw it. The Renault was tucked close to the side of the building, its lights out. I used a motel drive for a U-turn and when I went by again I could see neither of them. I turned into the small parking area next to the Best Beach Bar, cut the lights and motor and wondered what the hell to do next. It had ceased being any of my business, and I should have gone home. If Sis got into any trouble, it would be Cal McAllen’s problem, not mine. I could think of no reason in the world for her to have taken Charlie right to the office. It bothered me.
I got out and rubbed a thumbnail along the evening bristle on my jaw. I yearned for my dark porch, a tall drink, and the special timing of Miss Lee.
But I kept remembering Tom’s office had two windows on the rear of the building. So I went back there, stepping on something that broke with a sharp snapping sound, then kicking an empty can a dozen feet—about as stealthy as a drunken actor falling into the drums. An unseen cat spoke irritably to me. A mosquito did slow rolls inside my ear.
The blinds were down, the slats closed, but like most Venetian blinds the closure was less than perfect. From the first window I could see a section of the closed door and a segment of red leather couch and an edge of one of Tom’s framed pictures of himself receiving an award of some kind for civic virtue. The other window was better. I could see part of the shoulder of the sport shirt I had given Charlie, and I had a closeup of the back of his ear, so close that I was startled into backing away. I looked again, over his shoulder, and I saw a slice of Sis’s face. She was sitting at the desk, talking into Tom’s red telephone. He has a fixation about red, from T Bird and speedboat to his wife’s gaudy hair. But the reds he surrounds himself with make her look like gray carroty death.
The windows were sealed shut. I could see the movement of her lips, but I could hear no sound. Charlie moved out of my range of vision and reappeared beside Sis, bending to whisper into her ear as she momentarily covered the mouthpiece.
Many things dropped neatly into place all of a sudden. Charlie had been happy to sacrifice his freedom as some unknown service to Charity Weber. He had changed his mind in prison. He had to get hold of Charity. She would be the one who could clear him. He couldn’t risk phoning her. Sis could make the call and perhaps decoy Charity Weber into a situation where Charlie could get to her and talk to her. Once it was set up, he would have no more need for Sis’s services. Suddenly I remembered how very calm Charlie had seemed after he had gotten some rest. It wasn’t a very healthy calm. Suppose he was using Sis to decoy the woman into a situation where he could kill her. With his hands. He hadn’t wanted the gun. That would be nice. That would be very nice for everybody.
So it wouldn’t hurt to follow the whole deal a little longer.
I wanted to be in the car, ready to go. I started back toward my car. I had to pass once again behind the big new furniture store between the Best Beach Bar and the office.
After I had gone forty feet the flashlight beam struck me in the face. It was about ten feet away. It had nice new batteries in it. Surprises make me irritable. And I strongly disapprove of bright lights glaring into my eyes.
I wrenched my head around and said, “Cut it out!”
“Who you and what you doin’ back here?”
Because I was born and raised in Florida, I have often been accused of ‘mush-mouf’ diction, even though it seems to me I talk the same as anyone else. But this was basic swamp-talk I was hearing, the back country, slough and ’gator, grits and pellagra whine, full of a mock servility, yet flavored with an arrogance born of self knowledge of a special toughness that must be constantly tested to make certain it is still undiluted. I should have recited my name, address and occupation like an obedient child, and told him I had come back to check the rear door of the office building because I had wondered whether I had left it unlocked.
But he kept the light on my face, so I said, “I’m gathering mushrooms.” I took a step toward him and said, “Now get out of my way.”
The light went off. I had half a second in which to wonder if I was handling this very well, and then I had the same sensation as if a cherry bomb had been firmly taped to my skull over the left ear and detonated. The whole world jumped eight inches eastward. I felt the jar as I went down onto my knees, and I listened to a roaring that went fading, echoing, down through spiral staircases in the back of my brain.
The light was on me again and he said, in a tone of warm appreciation: “Well, you one tough son of a bitch! Plenty big, anyways.”
He moved to the side and I heard a faint whisper. The second bomb cracked a crater near the crown of my head and I spread myself gently, face down,
into the warm and placid Gulf, floating, while all the girls were laughing and Miss Lee sang. I felt him wrench my arms around behind me, felt a meaningless coolness of metal on my wrists. I felt him pry my wallet out of my hip pocket.
I rested. I was very tired.
He kicked me in the ribs, with insistence rather than brutality. “On your feet, boy. Pick all youself up an’ stand tall for LeRoy.”
I made the first effort and he gave me some help. When I was on my feet I felt tall and frail and a little bit sick to my stomach. He walked behind me, and gave me little jabs in the kidneys with the night stick to steer me in the proper direction. I got into the front seat of the dark blue sedan with the county decal on the door. I had to sit on the edge of the seat.
As he started up I realized I was once again capable of speech. “You’re making a mistake,” I said humbly.
“Now don’t we all, sooner or later.”
I had the feeling LeRoy and I were never going to strike up much of a friendship. He headed across the bridge to the mainland, driving without haste.
“You a new deputy?” I asked him.
“Best part of a year. You got a name?”
“Samuel Collins Brice.”
“Then you didn’t steal the money wallet maybe?”
“No, I didn’t steal the money wallet maybe.”
I got my first good look at him in the bridge lights. The brim of his ranch hat shadowed a pinched and narrow little face. His neck was too scrawny for the collar of the khaki shirt. He was about the size of a fourteen-year-old who had been sick and underfed. He kept his chin high in order to see over the hood, and he held the wheel firmly in his little brown hands.
“And what is your name, Mister Deputy, sir?”
“Depity LeRoy Luxey.”
“I’ve seen your name in the paper a lot lately. You make a lot of arrests.”
“If a man is put hisself in the arrestin’ trade, and does his work good, it comes out thataway somehow.”
He drove through empty streets and through the open iron gate into the courtyard area behind the Florence County Courthouse. Golden light shone through an open door onto the old brick paving, and as he herded me out of the car, I heard some men laughing. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or depressed to identify the rumbling bark of Sheriff Pat Millhaus.
As you go through the door you enter a corridor which has been narrowed by the addition of a waist-high counter on your right. Pat Millhaus lounged behind the counter with an inch of dead cigar in the corner of his mouth, a blue sports shirt—sweat-dark at the armpits—strained across the mound of hard belly. He was talking across the counter to a man I did not know, an old gentleman in a white linen suit that had turned to an ivory yellow with age.
Pat stared at me, his little dark eyes opening very round and wide, and suddenly they were squeezed into slits in the dark hard flesh of his face as he began to laugh. He laughed a lot longer than was necessary.
When he paused for breath, LeRoy Luxey asked gently, “You’d maybe be laughin’ at me, Sher’f?”
There was, implicit in that mild question, a terrible and innocent ferocity. Pat had half-tamed a wild thing and was using it for his own purposes. But it had to be handled with extraordinary care. I sensed, and so did Pat Millhaus, that if he had answered yes, the stringy little man would have immediately begun the blind and automatic and inescapable process of trying to kill his superior officer. The structure of his pride would have permitted no alternative.
The sheriff sobered at once and said, “I’m laughing at this damn fool you brung in, LeRoy. I’ve known him … just about eleven years. What’s the story on him, LeRoy.”
“I was checking the beach like you said on account of the B and E that’s been a-goin’ on out there, and I come on this Brice sneakin’ along behind of the Gulfway Furniture. I put the light on him and ast him what’s he doing, and he makes me some smart-mouth talk and comes at me, so I thumped him some and brang him on in. This here is the money wallet I took off’n him, and he’s got no knife or gun, Sher’f.”
“He talked smart, LeRoy, because he keeps forgetting somehow he isn’t a big time operator with his name in the papers any more. What were you doing out there, Sam?”
“I had the feeling I’d left the back door at Tom Earle’s office unlocked. I parked my car at Gus Herka’s place and walked back to check it. I was going back to Gus’s to get a beer and then go home when I was stopped by … your eager little assistant.”
“Would you be stupid enough to get any fancy ideas about lawing LeRoy here for assault and false arrest?”
“I think I asked for what I got, Pat.”
“We’ll get your name on a release form before you go, just in case. Unloose him there, LeRoy.”
When my hands were free, I fingered the damage. The one over the ear had left a knot the size of half a plum. It had creased the skin slightly, but the blood had caked in my hair. The other was smaller.
“If you can give me that release form,” I said.
“I think we ought to set and talk some,” Pat said. “We’ve never had a chance to talk since you come back to town, you know that?”
“I’ve never had the urge,” I told him. “I don’t have it now.”
“I could whip his haid a little more so’s he’d talk polite,” LeRoy said earnestly.
“I think you better get back on duty, LeRoy,” Pat Millhaus said. “This man has no record—at least not down here. He just has the habit of thinking he’s a little bit better than anybody else.”
The old gentleman, after staring at me with open curiosity, said good night to Pat and left. Pat took me down a corridor past his radio communications center to his office. He directed me to a straight chair in the middle of the room, facing his desk. He went behind his desk and lowered himself into a big green leather chair and stared at me with bland satisfaction. Except for black hair cropped so short the brown skull shows through, he looks like one of those old prints of the fat Indian chiefs who got annoyed with Custer.
Pat Millhaus is a good politician and a reasonably adequate law officer.
He played football for Florida Western. While I was playing for Florence City High he was a deputy sheriff who, by a rearrangement of his duty schedule, was able to work with the Florence City High coaching staff on a volunteer basis. It took me a long time to figure out why he singled me out. I finally realized it was because of all the members of the squad, I was the one who was obviously better than he had ever been. He rode me hard throughout those two seasons. The last game of my senior year was a night game. We won. After I had showered and changed, Millhaus and I went out back of the gym, all alone in the bright white moonlight. I was nineteen and I weighed one ninety. He was twenty-six and weighed two twenty. I had more height and reach, but I had played three quarters of a hard game that same night.
We fought for over an hour. We beat each other to bloody ruin. At times I couldn’t remember who I was fighting or why. At times we rested, our lungs creaking, our arms like dead meat, and then went at it again. I don’t know how many times I got up from the cool moist grass, back onto my feet, when I thought I’d never make it. I don’t know how many times I watched him climbing ponderously, slowly back onto his feet, as I waited, praying he wouldn’t make it.
It was a standoff. Afterwards we required medical and surgical attention and bed rest. Neither of us was worth a damn for a couple of weeks.
Folklore says that such an experience creates undying friendship. But it neither enhanced nor reduced our hatred.
“It’s a shameful thing to come so far down in the world you’ve got fellas like LeRoy putting knots on your All-American skull, Sam.”
“He’s a little quick with that stick.”
“It’s a shame you can’t call a press conference.”
“Knock it off, Millhaus.”
He shook his big head sadly. “There you were, right on top of the heap. Finest tackle in the league they were calling you. Had what
they call a shining future. Had that blonde wife that could make a fella go all sweaty just seeing her half a block away.”
“You’ve been waiting for this a long time, Pat. So have your fun.”
“But you were always so much more important than anybody else you figured you could make your own rules. So you got real cute, and you got thrown out of pro football for life. Oh, I know it didn’t get into the papers because that was part of the agreement. The papers talked about a bad knee you didn’t have. But they had to unload you, Brice, because they couldn’t take a chance on you throwing a ball game for a little cash money.”
“Enjoy yourself.”
“And when all of a sudden they busted you right down to nothing, you didn’t have a thing left to sorta hold the interest of that fancy little wife. Guess she decided if you were going to live under a cloud, you could live there all by yourself.”
“You’re a son of a bitch.”
He smiled comfortably. “I’m a sheriff son of a bitch, Sam. You’re a crooked ballplayer son of a bitch. And I’d love for you to get into some real trouble around here sometime, so you could see how I operate this department. And if you felt you were being treated less than fair, who would you yell to? Since that last uncle died, you’ve got no kin down here. No special friends. People figure you think you’re too good for the common folk. You’re a loner, Sam.” He leaned forward, “And there isn’t one soul in the big world gives enough of a damn about you to care what the hell I might do to you, given half a chance.”
“I’m intrigued to see how you can use your position to lean on me, Pat, instead of trying to pick up Charlie.”
I saw the flicker of a dangerous anger in his dark eyes. It went away as he leaned back in his big chair. “Right dangerous character, that Charlie Haywood.”
“Who knows?”
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 5
