Before I could turn the key, Luxey appeared at the side window and said, “Howdy.”
“And how are you, Mr. Skull-thumping Depity, sir?”
“That’s the prettiest girl I ever seen in my whole life.”
“And I suspect she’s just as nice as she looks, LeRoy.”
“If you mess around with her, Brice, I can make you sorry you ever lived to grow so big.”
“Your trouble, LeRoy, is you want to stand guard on the whole world.”
“I’ll stand guard on my little piece of it, Brice.”
“Go catch yourself some prowlers.”
“It’s grave quiet around here. If Haywood was coming around, he’s had plenty of chance afore now. I talked to Mr. Weber and we agreed how this had best be my last night down here.”
“I wouldn’t want you to be bored, LeRoy.”
“Man never gets bored doing his given work, Brice. I was up onto my toes only one time tonight, but it turned out it was just him and her having a fight.”
“The Webers? I heard they never fight.”
“Then you heard wrong, or they just begun a new habit. I figured somebody maybe snuck by me, but when I found me the right winder I seen it was just the two of them doing all the fussing, in that big bedroom, and her in her stark naked hide, honest to Bess.”
“Now you can arrest yourself for being a Peeping Tom, LeRoy.”
“I took jest the one look, thinking at first glance she had on little white pants and a little white top thing, but it was where that sun burn leaves off on her. I should think a woman with skin that white would want to stay white and pretty.”
“It’s a fad, LeRoy.”
“I took jest one look like I said and while I was taking in the fact it was a family fuss, I couldn’t help seeing she’s built awful good for a lady her age. I hunkered down under the window and walked away, but not before he shut up all that yelling by smacking her a good one, the way it sounded. She cut off in the middle of a word and then she got to moaning some and I heard a door slam.”
“What was she yelling about?”
“I don’t really know. She was yelling and crying all at once and getting the words all gobbled up the way a female will do, but it was something about not being able to stand any more, or being able to go on. Woman talk. And he give her a man answer.” He turned his head and spat. “It’s none of your business nor mine, Brice. You can drive on out of here any time.”
So I said good night to the savage little man and drove away, leaving him to his sleepless, restless, silent prowling.
8
On Saturday morning I had an early call from an adjustor in Tampa, and I had to make one appraisal in Venice and one in Punta Gorda, which used up all of the morning, because I had to track the Punta Gorda car through three different stops before I caught up with it.
I went back to the office after lunch, wrote out my reports in longhand for Alice to type up, made up a mail deposit of accumulated checks for appraisal fees, balanced my check book and brought my expense records up to date. Cal McAllen phoned me just as I was leaving, so I drove over to town and went up to his office.
I hadn’t seen him since Tuesday. The four days had marked him. There was a gray look to his skin. The bone structure of his face looked more prominent. His eyes seemed to have sunk back into his head.
He was apologetic. “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you, Sam. I haven’t got any new information. It’s driving me out of my mind. I just wanted to talk to somebody about her. I can’t talk to her family. They act like I’m an interloper.”
“When there’s trouble, that Gantry family gets very tight knit.”
“I’ve arranged with Pat Millhaus to put up five thousand dollars for information regarding her whereabouts. It will be in this evening’s paper.”
“That should bring in a lot of crackpot assistance.”
“They’re getting a lot of wild tips already, Sam. They’re checking them all out. One man claims he saw them, Sis and that Haywood, going aboard a freighter over in Everglades City. They ran a radio check on that one, and it was a forty year old Brazilian woman and her son on their way home to Rio. Damn it, Sam, I just …”
“Waiting is the hardest thing we’re ever asked to do, Cal.”
“Have you had any other ideas at all?”
I suppose I could have briefed him on what I was doing, with Peggy’s help. But there wasn’t anything specific as yet. And I suspected that in his anxiety he was not capable of handling any delicate situation. He would charge in, yelling and waving his arms, glad of the release.
We talked for a little while longer. After I left his office I was aware of something buried so deeply in my mind I could not get at it. Something I had been told did not fit with the other information. The oyster solves her problem of granular irritation by coating the offending object with pearl juice. But the unidentifiable little object in my mind kept sliding around, scratchy and obstinate. When I tried to get a good look at it, it moved out of reach.
I took my problem to a drugstore counter and, after a second cup of stale-tasting coffee I began to get the feeling that it was a problem of timing. I wrote out a little schedule on the back of an envelope:
August 10 Charlie escapes (Wednesday)
12 Two men arrive at Webers (Friday night)
14 Charlie arrives at my place (Sunday)
15 Charlie and Sis disappear (Monday night)
16 Two men leave (Tuesday night)
17 Peggy arrives (Wednesday late afternoon)
I stared blankly at my timetable. There was one inference that could be made. The newspapers had covered Charlie Haywood’s escape. Maurice Weber could have yelled for help as soon as he learned of the escape. The two men could have arrived in answer to the yell, ready to take care of Charlie if and when he showed up. And if he did show up Monday night and if they did take care of him, then they could leave on Tuesday night, mission accomplished.
But it wasn’t what was bothering me. Suddenly I realized what it was. I added one more item to my list.
August 16 Millhaus checks Weber house (Tuesday morning)
I went right to the Florence Courthouse. It was a little after three in the afternoon, and the air had become very still and heavy. Thunderheads were piled massive and high over the Gulf, grumbling toward the mainland.
I had to wait twenty minutes before I could see him. By the time I got into his office, the sunshine outside his window had a coppery look and the separate thumps of thunder were spaced and identifiable.
Pat waved me to a chair, a smile of habitual contempt on his Indian-looking face. He wore a green sports shirt unbuttoned to the waist, exposing a chest thatched hard and black, with one irregular patch of white centered between the brute nipples, a patch as big as a grapefruit. His face and chest glistened as though he had been sprayed with glycerine.
“Hot one,” he said. “Damn if I can even get a room air conditioner approved. Man can’t think so good with his brains steaming. Luxey tells me you got the hots for a pretty little house guest out to the Weber place. You keep her out all night, he says. A big hero like you, when one shack job turns up missing, you don’t waste no time lining up something else.”
I stared at him. “What makes you so damn miserable, Pat?”
“It’s a funny thing, Sam. Everybody on the wrong side of the law comes up with the idea I’m miserable. But I play poker regular with some of the biggest men in this county and they like me just fine.”
“What gives you the idea I’m on the wrong side of the law?”
“A man works around the law long enough, he gets the knack of picking out the bad ones. You’ve got no record yet, Sam. Maybe you’ve been too cute to get caught. Maybe you haven’t had the nerve to do anything worse than try to throw a ball game. But I got the comfortable feeling you and I, we stay in the same county long enough, one day I’m going to be able to ride on out and watch you swinging a brush hook on the County Road Gang.”
“For God’s sake, Millhaus, I’m more honest than you are!”
He leaned his beefy arms on the desk. “Just get it through your head, Sam, we’re talking across a fence, me on one side, you on the other. Now what the hell do you want?”
“I came to ask you a question. Last Tuesday morning you checked the Weber house and grounds.”
“What’s that to you?”
“Who all was there, at the house, Pat?”
He leaned back and looked at me with distaste. “I got the funny idea you’re trying to mess into this thing, Brice.”
“I’m just asking a question.”
“I’d surely love to find out you’re doing some investigating without having a license for it.”
“Sis is my friend. It’s normal curiosity. Cal McAllen has normal curiosity too. So does her family.”
“The Webers give me complete cooperation, Brice. They cooperated fine when Haywood got sent up. They cooperated fine the other day. I’m satisfied they don’t figure in this thing at all.”
“Then why not tell me who was at the house?”
The last of the sun went suddenly and the world darkened and, after the few first, fat, random drops, the rain came down in a great roaring wash, with blue crack of lightning and busy artillery barrage of thunder. Pat jumped up and adjusted the windows and turned on the desk light. It dimmed and went out.
He raised his voice above the storm. “At the house was the Webers and that Kraut couple and the boat captain.”
“And house guests?”
“I was told so, but I didn’t see ’em. There was a rental car there. The house guests were on the beach, I was told.”
“You had no chance to question them, then?”
“Why the hell should I? Mr. and Mrs. Weber, they said everybody had gone to bed early on Monday night and nobody had heard a thing. Goddamn it, Brice, get your nose the hell out of my job or I sure as hell will book you for obstructing justice.”
“Isn’t there a lot of pressure on you about this thing?”
“Are you worried about me?”
“You should welcome any constructive interest in it, Pat.”
“Why don’t you run for sheriff, you silly bastard? Don’t tell me how to do my job.”
“So where do you think Sis Gantry is?”
“I can tell you just where she is, Brice. Haywood knew the Gantry family well. He knew Sis would come on the run to help anybody she felt needed her. You should know. That’s the same approach you used, isn’t it?”
“If you know everything there is to know, you don’t have to ask.”
“So he phoned her and she went out in that little car and picked him up someplace, and on account of he was a mess from five days in the swamps, her heart went out to him. He had to have someplace to hide, right? So she takes him back into the back country someplace. That girl used to hunt with her brothers. She takes him back to some shack and once they got there, he took charge and he won’t let her loose, afraid she’ll be questioned and give something away. And he hasn’t had his hands on a woman in over two years, so that’s something you got to figure too. He’s got the little car covered up with brush, and when all the fuss dies down, he’s going to take off north and try to get out of the state, and maybe he’ll let her loose and maybe he’ll kill her.”
“What are they doing for food and water, Pat?”
“When she left the house she had maybe fifty dollars in her purse. She left the house a little after eight. There’s little grocery stores all over the area that’re hungry enough to stay open late. It’s none of your damn business but we’ve been checking them out, Sam, and some woman bought about forty dollars worth of stuff around nine o’clock closing time at a little store north of town. The owner that waited on her doesn’t have the faintest idea of what she looked like on account of he’s had one cataract operation and he’s due for the next and he can’t get used to the glasses, so he kind of operates his little store by touch and memory. He doesn’t remember much of the order, except there was a lot of staples in it, sugar, salt, flour and so on. I figure she thought she was picking up that stuff for Haywood, not knowing he wasn’t going to let her loose once she took him to a good place to hide out and get rested up.”
“If he wanted to run, Pat, why did he come back here?”
“You’d make a poor sheriff if you can’t figure that out. It was the direction where he figured we’d do the least looking. And where else could he go to find anybody to give him some help?”
It had a considerable amount of weight. Suppose when Sis had phoned Charity Weber at Charlie’s request, while I was spying on them through the window, Charity had refused to talk to Charlie, or, if Sis had been trying to trick Charity into a situation where she couldn’t help seeing Charlie, she had suspected what was happening. Then it might have happened just as Pat assumed.
“Now get out,” he said, “and don’t come back wasting my time.”
I went out and waited in the doorway until the rain let up, and then ran to my car. I had cleverly left the windows open and the front seat was awash. I wiped it reasonably dry with a rag. The last of the rain moved east and the sun was out again. Steam drifted up from all the streets. There was an illusion of freshness in the air, and the scent of wet lush soil, hot damp pavement.
Three blocks from the courthouse I discarded Pat Millhaus’s theory. It was not within the range and limits of Sis’s character not to let her people know she was all right. And it was not conceivable that Charlie Haywood could have wanted to or been able to restrain her forcibly. All persons are imprisoned by their own moral and ethical standards. Never, except in madness, do they step beyond their own limitations.
At quarter after four I decided to go take a look at the Sea Queen. It was an idle impulse. I’d never seen her close up. And I realized it might be an easier way to check ownership.
I had a choice of several marinas, but I remembered that it had been repaired previously at Jimson’s. I turned off the main road a mile north of my place and drove over to the bay front. Though it has gradually turned into a big operation, Jimson’s retains a look of clutter, rust, decay and indifference. The sheds and bigger buildings are clustered in a haphazard way. Their big docks need new pilings. They have covered storage, both fresh and salt water. They have a good deep channel and they can haul anything up to seventy feet, run it inside on cradle and tracks and rebuild it, if you have money enough. They have the best marine engine mechanics in the area, good franchises, and a pricing policy that has made strong men weep.
On that Saturday afternoon there was the usual aimless, dogged activity you find around any big boat yard, a whining of saws and sanders, clang of engine tools being dropped on concrete, sharp odors of varnish, paint, gasoline and solvent. Owners were working on their own boats, and the yard employees were working on contract tasks.
I wandered around without anybody paying the slightest attention to me until I found the Sea Queen. She was at that covered dock space where repairs are made, sitting in a slip with her stern to the dock. A man in dirty khaki shorts and a blue baseball cap was fitting a new section of railing at the starboard corner of the transom. He slipped the freshly shaped piece of mahogany into place. He was a small old man with a knotted brown back.
He turned and looked at me and grinned, exposing a crying need for expensive dentistry and said, “Well now! Hayou, Sammy?”
“Hello, J. B. I thought you were in a rocking chair, living off your grandchildren.”
“That’s surely where I’d like to be. But old Jimson, he sweet talks me into working myself right to the edge of the grave, saying he can’t get people to do good work any more. And he can’t, by God. But it gives him fits how I won’t work on no production line boats. It shames me to touch one of them shoddy things. I’ll only work on boats that’re put together honest in the first place.”
“This is the Weber boat, isn’t it, J. B.?”
“Yep.” He took the piece of railing over
to his work bench, sanded one end carefully, brought it back and tapped it carefully into place with a padded mallet. “Ought to do it,” he said.
“It’s a perfect match, J. B.”
“Has to be, if I do it.” He examined the bit in an electric drill, and began to drill for the screws that would hold the section in place.
“What happened to it, J. B.?”
“It was being brung into a dock at low tide, with the wind and current tricky, and the stern swung under the dock and the rail got splintered and bent all to hell, Sammy. Shame to have happen to a boat gets the care this one does.”
“Care if I go aboard and look at her?”
“Don’t matter to me none, but if that Chase fella comes back when you’re aboard, he could turn up ugly. He left when the rain started and didn’t say if he was coming back. He don’t say much of anything. Your daddy, he was a quiet man, but not the same way. Your daddy liked other folks to be talking, but Chase don’t want much to do with the human race, it looks like. Its a relief to have him gone for a while. He watches every damn move I make.”
I went aboard. It was fifty-four feet of luxury and had every navigation aid known except radar. It was equipped with air conditioning and television and a handsome flying bridge. It took me about two minutes to find the log and the papers. There are very few logical places to keep such items aboard any boat. The listed owner was Starr Development. I checked below fast and furtive as a thief. When I stepped back onto the deck, I knew what was wrong with the Sea Queen. The Webers had been using her for over four years. But they’d left no mark on her. There were some clothes, toilet articles, liquor and food stowed neatly aboard, and there was an oversize bunk in the master stateroom neatly made up, but it looked as though they had used it for four weeks rather than four years. And only obsessive maintenance could have kept the below decks and topsides in such perfect and shining condition.
J. B. was countersinking brass screws into the new section of rail. “Good shape, isn’t she?”
“The best.”
Where Is Janice Gantry? Page 14
