We went to the cottage. “Can I prowl?” she asked, “or do I have to be polite?”
“Prowl, please.”
She went through the place like an auditor. The only thing she didn’t do was open the bureau drawers. She was like a pet cat in a new house. She wore a cinnamon blouse, a pale gray skirt, sandals. I made drinks, put a background record on, took the drinks out onto the porch and settled down patiently. She turned the living room light out, on her way out, leaving on the one lamp near the window so that there was a faint light on the porch.
She sat and took a sip of her drink and said, “You alarm me.”
“I’ve tried not to.”
“You’re so darn tidy. I live amid piles of junk. Nice clean junk, but piles of it. And there’s more books and records than I would have guessed.”
“Cultural pretention. To impress girls.”
“Hmmm. No pictures of Judy?”
“Why should there be? Why should I salt a wound?”
“Or of Sis?”
“That would have the flavor of a trophy, and that wasn’t the way it was.”
“Do you mind the prying, Sam? Does it bother you?”
“In anybody else in the world it would. But I have the feeling it’s something you had to do.”
“I wouldn’t do it to anybody else in the world. I have better manners. I think we’d better yank the conversation out of this whole general area. Time for my report, sir.”
“I knew you’d found out something, or you wouldn’t have saved it.”
“I think I must be getting too darn obvious or something. Anyhow, I don’t think it’s much. I flew into Tampa two days ago, on Wednesday, the seventeenth. I flew Eastern down, same as last time. They met me last year at Tampa International. She said they’d meet me again this year. But it was Herman who met me. He said Char had a headache and Maurice was too busy. I don’t know what he’d be so darn busy about. Herman has very little conversation, so it was a dull ride down from Tampa. By the time I arrived, Charity was about three drinks along, but she still looked tired. There is a guest wing with a suite. I turned it down last time. It seemed too grand. It wasn’t even offered to me this time. I got the same room as before, in the main part of the house. And the darn room smelled like cigars. The air conditioning was on, but it still smelled like stale cigars. I didn’t think much about it at the time, I thought Maurice had been in there for some reason. He smokes cigars. Is this getting too involved?”
“Not yet.”
She took something from the pocket of her skirt and handed it to me. I could tell by the feel that it was a packet of book matches. I looked at it by the flame of my lighter. The matches were from a bar on Burgundy Street in the Quarter in New Orleans.
“I found them on the floor of my closet,” she said proudly.
“Proving what?”
“Anna Mahler is a demon housekeeper. She sticks to a schedule. Saturdays she mops and dusts, closets and all. She’d no more miss those matches than she’d miss a dead horse. Cigar smell, plus matches, plus her iron schedule means recent guests.”
“It maybe means something worth checking.”
“That’s what I thought, so I did. I nailed Anna in the kitchen when she was starting to fix dinner. I scrounged a snack and hung around and engaged her in idle talk, steering it around to the idea that with a house so big she had a lot of work to do, and if there were guests all the time it would be too much for one woman and so on. Finally there was a breakthrough. Two men arrived after dark on the twelfth, just one week ago tonight. They arrived late and Mr. Weber must have known they were coming because he had stayed up, apparently waiting for them, but he hadn’t warned Anna, and she was a little bit miffed at that. They stayed four days, and left after dark on Tuesday. They had a rental car. They have never stayed there before. And Charity was sick all the time they were there. She had her meals served in her room.”
“It’s … very interesting, Peggy.”
“I got just a little bit too inquisitive, and she suddenly closed right up again, so I went wandering off with an air of great indifference. But if your key night is last Monday night, there were a pair of strange men in the house.”
“Names or descriptions?”
“No names. And the only wisp of description is Anna’s statement that they were ‘city men’, whatever that may mean. And I had the feeling, Sam, that when she suddenly clammed up, she’d been given the impression … not an order … not to talk about any house guests they might have.”
“It’s a damn queer household.”
She was curled up in the big chair, her face in shadow except where the edge of the light touched the jeweled gleam of one eye.
“Up until today,” she said in a thoughtful tone, “I thought it was just sort of odd and stuffy and … ingrown. Now it’s getting sinister, sort of. I don’t really know her at all. I can sense that he feels that letting me come to visit her is … a special concession. I did just a little bit more prying after I talked to Anna.”
“You’ll have to be …
“Careful. Yes. I sense that more and more, Sam. Char and I were in the living room waiting for Anna to say dinner was ready. Maurice was somewhere else in the house. So I just kept trying to establish a conversation that would make it logical for her to tell me about having guests who left just before I arrived, and logical for her to mention being sick while they were there. It wasn’t a direct kind of prying. But it gave her all the chance in the world to mention it. And she didn’t. So she had a good reason not to mention it. She was the one doing the prying. She kept asking me about you. I edited you down to a big, amiable, harmless tower of muscle.”
“That’s too accurate.”
“It is not! Anyway, the heat sort of died away. So, at dinner, I brought up Sis Gantry.”
“That’s a brilliant move! How the hell do you …”
“It would have been more obvious not to bring it up, Sam. We saw the six o’clock news on channel 13 out of Tampa where they re-broadcast a tape interview with Sheriff Millhaus. He was very cautious. He said that they had no actual evidence to link her disappearance with the information that Charles Haywood had been in the area at the time she disappeared, but they had not discounted the possibility the two things might be connected. After all, it is big local news, and, as a house guest, I’d have to talk about it, especially with that fierce little man guarding the house at night. They had already explained about him, you know.”
“What did they say?”
“That was the evening of the day I arrived. Charity did the talking. Maurice was there. She just said that a man had broken into the house over two years ago and they’d come home and surprised him, and it had been very upsetting. Now he had escaped from a road gang and had been seen in the area, so a guard had been posted in case he tried to come back, to attempt to rob them again or get even with them for capturing him and turning him in. She said I shouldn’t be upset because neither of them thought he would come to the house. It was all … just a little too calm and casual.”
“So how did you bring Sis into it tonight?”
“I just asked them if they thought Charlie and Sis had gotten together somehow. Maurice just shrugged and kept gobbling his dinner. Charity asked me what I meant. I said that maybe it was a romance and he had escaped to come back to see her, and they had gone off together and that was why she hadn’t gotten in touch with anybody because she didn’t want to endanger him.”
“I think some people have that theory—people who don’t know either of them personally.”
“Char said it was a marvelous theory. She got practically manic about it, all hopped up about it. She said she had the hunch that that was exactly what happened. Then she said she wished them luck. She hoped they’d get clean away and start a new life together somewhere else and nobody would ever find them again. So I said that was pretty hard to do. Char said it wasn’t hard to do if you planned it carefully. Maurice stood up and told her she was a sloppy
drunk with a big mouth. He walked away. I’d never heard him say anything like that to her. I’m telling you, it left one big hole in the conversation. Char sat with her eyes shut for a few seconds and then she opened them and got terribly chatty and vivacious about a lot of trivial nonsense, but all the time she was acting like an actress on a Mike Wallace interview, the tears kept running right down her face. I couldn’t even tell if she knew she was crying, Sam. And she kept the act going right up until the time when I left the house. Something is cracking up, Sam. Something is going all to hell, and fast. They seem to be under terrible pressure.”
I told her about my espionage activities. I told her I would probably hear from Lou Leeman on Monday. I didn’t know if he would report anything that would make any sense.
“How about the Sea Queen?” she asked.
“What about it?”
“It has a number on it so it must be registered somewhere. I wonder if Maurice owns it. And the car.”
“Why don’t I think of these things? I’ll check that out. Build you another drink, Peggy?”
“I don’t know. Where are we going?”
“What would you like to do?”
“Well … you did mention you have a boat. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble to take it out at night …”
So I took her out in the Lesser Evil. It’s an elderly twenty-foot lapstreak skiff, with an eight-foot beam, stubby foredeck, folding navy top, lots of walkaround. In spite of the heft of the mahogany and white oak hull, and the matronly beam, the one hundred and fifteen horse Chrysler marine will cruise her at twenty knots, and she’ll run dry. She’s got an electric bilge pump, self-bailing cockpit and good stowage for gear. The sixty gallon plastic gas tank gives her adequate range. There’s a folding captain stool, but there is plenty of freeboard and the steering is set high, so I usually run her standing up, looking over the windshield instead of through it.
After the engine was turning over, I cast off the lines, turned the running lights on, put her in gear and went burbling and mumbling out toward the channel, Peggy standing beside me holding onto the windshield brace.
“It’s wonderful!” she said. “Why that name?”
“It’s corny and too cute. A couple of years ago I had a thousand bucks saved up. I was feeling restless, and maybe a little depressed. I wanted to fly over to Havana and blow it all on one large binge. But I chose the Lesser Evil. I got the hull for four hundred, with a junk engine. I bought the rebuilt Chrysler for three fifty. I put a lot of hours into it. Odds and ends used up the rest of the grand, and a little more.”
“Do you use it much?”
“Often enough to be glad I’ve got it.”
“I didn’t even know it was such a beautiful night. There’s a billion stars, Sam.”
“And a moon coming up behind us, girl.”
I turned south down the marked channel and I had to use the big spotlight just once to pick up my marker at the turn out through Horseshoe Pass. There was a slight chop in the swash channel, and a gentle swell once we were clear of the pass. I moved out about a half-mile off shore and headed north along the Key. I put the loop of a line on a spoke of the wheel and we went back and sat on the broad transom. We chugged along at dead slow, leaving a phosphorescent wake. The Key beach was a snowy white off the starboard. I pointed out the lights of the Weber place to her, and Ack’s place. She found she could look over the side and see the bright streaks made by startled fish.
“Darn it, I wish I’d brought my suit and cap,” she said.
“I’ve got a boarding ladder. You wouldn’t have to get your hair wet. We’re in about thirty feet. Easy to anchor.”
“Sam, I am often unwise, but not completely damn foolish. I’m not going to put that much strain on our character. The day I go prancing around in my birthday suit will be the day when I’m ready for everything that can happen. Okay?”
“Okay. Next time bring your …” A great luminous thrashing and sloshing off the port bow interrupted me. I grabbed a light boat rod from the rack, all rigged and ready with a spoon and trolling weight. I paid the line out over the transom, checked the star drag and gave her the rod. I boosted the throttle and went by the area of violence where the hungry teeth slashed at the school of bait in the moonlight, then swung to port to take the lure through the patch.
I turned and watched her. She stood braced and tense. Suddenly the rod bent and she yelped once and the rod stayed bent and the reel whined as the fish took line against the drag.
“It’s a monster! Come help me!”
I laughed at her and told her it was her monster. In a few minutes I knew what it was from the style and frenzy of the runs it made. I kept the engine in neutral, putting it back in gear just a couple of times to swing the stern toward the fish. Each time she would get it close, it would take off again. When it was time, I put on cotton gloves and took a flashlight and went back. I was able to grasp the leader and horse the fish up until I could grab the spoon. I held him up with the light on him.
“What is he? He’s beautiful!”
“That’s what his name means. Bonito. He’ll go about eight or nine pounds. Mackerel family, but inedible. Very black bloody meat.”
“Let him go, Sam.” I turned the hook upward. He flapped free, splashed into the black water and was gone. “I thought he’d be three times as big as that.”
“They’re a very strenuous fish.”
“How big do they get?”
“I don’t know. I think the all tackle record is somewhere around forty pounds.”
“He can go tell his wife he had one hell of a strange experience. Golly, my wrists are practically lame. How long did it take me?”
“Six or seven minutes.”
“I would have said it was a whole half hour.”
I took the rod from her, sunk the barb in the cork handle and put it back into the rack.
“I liked that, Sam. That was fun! I never thought I’d like to catch a fish. Was I good at it?”
“If there was anything you did do wrong, I can’t think of it right now. He was hooked solid, or you’d never gotten a look at him. Some time I’ll take you down to the mouth of the Shark River when the baby tarpon are hitting bass plugs. They fight in the water and in the air right over your head.”
“You do that … some time,” she said in a small odd voice.
I had spoken with blissful innocence, without thinking of the implications of what I said. I had spoken out of a subconscious certainty that I would take her to many places, and we would do many things together.
“How about a fast run to a beer joint?” I said heartily.
“Let’s go!”
I opened it up. I let her take the wheel until we got to the pass. She made some wide open circles, standing the craft on its ear, laughing aloud as she did so. I took her into the bay and headed north along the unofficial channel that hugs the bay side of the Key.
“There’s the Weber boat basin,” I said, “but I don’t see the Sea Queen.”
“Oh, it’s at a marina, Char told me, getting some work done on it. It should be back soon, she said. She knows how much I enjoyed going out on it with them the last time I was here. But … I like this boat better.”
“It cost about sixty-nine thousand bucks less, my dear.” We tied up at Tad’s Sea-Bar just north of City Bridge, drank some draught beer and were driven out sooner than I expected by too much bad, loud music on the juke, and by the entranced hovering of a young man who, big as a school bus, drunk as an unemployed comedian, had fallen hopelessly in love with Peggy the moment he saw her. It was the sort of thing that had happened so often with Judy that it was a sweet sadness to have it happening again. But I found I had a different attitude about it. In the days of Judy the special attention she received in every public place had tickled my pride in being the chosen escort of such a superb status symbol, and it had also made me feel a deadly and pleasurable willingness to rise and smite any clown who carried admiration one half-step too
far.
I was glad to be once again with a girl men admire. (Sis had never wanted to be taken to public places.) But I was pleased for her sake rather than my own. I did not have the feeling of a man bearing a trophy of the chase. And I was not concealing any eagerness to hit anybody. I knew that the change in attitude made me more relaxed and comfortable in public. I wondered if there was the outside chance I might be growing up. In the old days I would have littered the sawdust floor with the burly boy’s teeth. Instead I hustled Peggy back aboard the Lesser Evil and ran up the main channel toward home under a platinum shimmer of moonlight.
I moored the boat and took the girl home. I blinked my lights twice as I pulled up in front of the Weber house.
“There is one pine tree along the beach I want to see if it is still there,” she said rapidly.
“It’s the sort of thing we better keep checking on,” I agreed.
I was very aware of Luxey off somewhere in the shadows as we walked away from the car. We went up the beach.
“This one, I think it was,” Peggy said.
“You’re so right,” I said, as she lifted her arms and her lips.
I released her after a long warm time of our increasing involvement. “Every night becomes the best night ever,” she whispered.
“It’s going to be quite a responsibility to keep that up.”
“I don’t want to be a responsibility. I want to be an old shoe girl. I want to be cozy, damn it. Somebody told me once I have a champagne and stateroom look. I can’t help that. I’m more the beer and scow type inside.”
“You’re a glamorous model. You scare me.”
“Do you like the way I look?”
“I like it fine.”
“Then it’s all right with me too.” I kissed her again and walked her back to the house. I wanted to pick her up earlier Saturday night, but she said she thought the same time would be about right, so she wouldn’t feel guilty about leaving Charity alone. I watched her out of sight past the shrubbery at the curve of the front walk, and then got into the car.
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 13
