There was no music on the dock to screen the sound she was making. It was atavistic, penetrating all layers of drunkenness except with those who were unconscious. It drew the people from the mainland and the other docks and the boats, some hurrying, some approaching with evident reluctance.
Orbie started to go aboard, then made a gesture of helplessness and resignation. There were shouts of alarm and interrogation. Mingled with the woman’s screams and the other sounds, there was a violent thumping sound. Jack Engly reappeared, bent forward from the waist, moving slowly, his face, in the white glare of the floods, a corroded mask of effort, lips pulled back from his teeth, blue eyes sickeningly blank. He plodded forward, pulling. Muscles ridged his right arm.
He pulled Rigsby out into the brilliance of the lights. Rigsby was on the gaff, naked. The point had entered the front of his throat and emerged from the nape of his neck, a full inch off center. Rigsby writhed and spasmed, trying to grasp the wrist of the hand that held the gaff, trying to get his legs under him. The growing crowd moved back, making an odd simultaneous sound like the sigh of a great weary animal.
Rigsby’s struggles grew less violent. Jack Engly crawled up onto the dock, crouching. With a final heave, a monstrous, bone-cracking effort, he came erect, yanking the limp body up onto the dock and, with a most dextrous and professional motion, slipping the gaff out the instant the weight was off his arm. Rigsby landed heavily on his side. His head thumped the dock timbers. He rolled half onto his face. Blood spread under the throat. A brown hand crawled a little way on its fingers. It shuddered and then was suddenly flat and soft against the dock. Too flat, too soft, too significantly motionless.
The woman-screams, clotted with hoarseness, verging on madness, continued.
Engly looked once at the body, then turned slowly and began to walk toward shore, a jerky, mechanical, uncoordinated walk. They jumped aboard boats to give him all the room he might need. Lew Burgoyne blocked his way. Engly stopped and stared beyond him.
“Hand me the gaff, Jack. You’re scarin’ folks.”
Engly handed it to him without comment. Two women had fainted. Anne Browder had broken away from Joe and gone aboard the Angel to see what she could do for Judy Engly. Somebody mercifully threw a tarp over the body. Somebody else phoned the police. In a little while they heard the sirens in the night.
At four in the morning, after Judy had been given a shot that dropped her into unconsciousness and had been taken to the Elihu Beach Memorial Hospital, and after the body had been taken to the city morgue, and Jack Engly taken in for interrogation, after the temporary dock lights were off, the reporters and photographers gone, the last revelers silenced, Leo and Christy drove over to the beach, left the car and walked a long long way on the packed sand left by the outgoing tide, walked in what was left of the moonlight. He held her hand as they walked. They talked little. There was nothing to say.
Finally they sat in the dry sand up beyond the high tide line and waited to watch the sunrise.
“Even for a man like that, it was too …”
“I know, darling.”
“I couldn’t have killed him. I could thump my chest and make loud and dramatic noises, but now I know I couldn’t have killed him.”
“I knew that too.”
“I couldn’t kill anybody, actually. Be jury and judge and hangman. Not coldly like that. Maybe in defence of home or woman. As, in a way, Jack did. But …”
“I know what you are, darling. And love what you are.”
“Foolish girl.”
“Sure. Foolish and lucky, maybe.”
There was a red line in the east, and then the long slow explosion of the dawn, and a red sun climbing out of the sea.
She leaned closer and kissed the corner of his mouth. “May I be right corny, Mister Leo?”
“You have permission.”
“See? Sunrise. New beginning. Symbolic. New beginning for us, because the other is all over now. You’ve toyed with my affections, and you’re rich and pretty, so I demand marriage.”
“I was juss fixin’ to ask you, Miz Yale.”
THIRTEEN
This is a long passage from a very long letter written several years later by Joe Rykler to an old friend and editor who stayed with Joe for the two weeks directly following the birthday party.
Dear Sam,
I can understand your feverish concern about what happened to all the people you met down here. It is because you are a very neat man, and you have to have everything tied up. It is the same reason you over-edit my copy.
Wouldn’t you rather be left in the dark, and just imagine what happened to everybody? And if, as you said, it has been bothering you, why did you have to wait so long? I couldn’t even remember some of this stuff and had to go ask people. And you knew all the names. What did you do? Take notes?
I will not take them in any special order. Helen Hass is now Mrs. Walter Biggerts. You didn’t meet him. She met hm at an adult education course, and he was a very shiftless, helpless, poorly organized guy, and presto, she had an outlet for all those terrifying organizational energies of hers. He is now totally organized, but looks a little haunted, and the sole by-product of this union, thus far, is being raised in accord with the fattest rule books in the business.
I guess you want to know particularly about Captain Jimmy and his Jannifer Jean on account of you were so knocked out by that story of the pieces of paper the size of money. It turned out it was just too good a story, and finally poor Captain Jimmy heard it from a man in a bar who didn’t know who Captain Jimmy was. Captain Jimmy asked enough questions to be absolutely sure, and then he went on a five-day drunk. After he out-sat the hangover, he got him a gaff handle and he beat Moonbeam into a cringing lump of contrition, a very long and noisy process. It took half a dozen of those sessions to give her a constructive attitude toward marriage. She’s still sloppy, but she does the cooking and wears clothes that cover her, and jumps to attention when Captain Jimmy snaps his fingers. In typical Southern tradition, he is keeping her barefoot and pregnant, and she is not likely to get into any more trouble.
Dink Western had a little mishap which pleased everybody. He took a charter out a while back. Dave Harran wasn’t with him. Dink managed to fall overboard. The tourists couldn’t run the boat, but they sure as hell tried. They made a big circle and came back after him at full cruising speed and ran right the hell over him. Lew Burgoyne bought the Bally-Hey from the widow and, after extensive repairs and cleaning and repainting, turned it over to Dave to operate for him.
That drunken Beezie I introduced you to got a quick divorce over a year ago and went to live on her alimony in Cuernavaca with an old buddy of hers named Gloria Garvey.
About Rex Rigsby, they couldn’t turn up any will or any heirs, so they buried him at his expense and stuck the rest of his dough in an escrow account and auctioned off the Angel. A thousand years from now the State of Florida will grab hold of the money. There were four mourners at the services, all female. Those Decklin brothers made a big fat public relations gesture by bidding the high bid on the Angel and then turning it over to the local Sea Scouts.
That sweet guy, Orbie Derr, finally got fed with those batches of Bitty-Beddy girls, so he quit and got a job as hired captain of something big and fast called the Can-Do. A constructon outfit owns it, and they send no women down, so Orbie’s nerves are a lot better.
I guess you read about old Gus Andorian. The wire services picked up the full story of that jam he got into about six months after the party. A beery episode of a truly gargantuan quaintness. So all the horrified daughters and their husbands tried to lawyer the hell out of him, getting him declared incompetent and released in their custody and so on, so they could dole his pension out to him. But Gus got hold of a smart lawyer too, and he didn’t like the advice his boy gave him, but it was his best out, so after a lot of grumbling and sighing, he married Alice Stebbins, and he’s been astonished ever since that she’s made no cut in his beer rati
on.
You probably read about Sid Stark, too, Sam. I guess people got tired of trying to serve those papers on him. That’s why they hired the expert to come down and blow a great big hole in his chest. An ex-wife attached the boat for back alimony, and his pals gave him one hell of a big funeral in Jersey. I heard the other day that Francesca Portoni, billed as Mary Flying Feather, the Seminole Princess, is doing a real frantic strip in a Miami Beach joint.
You had the good sense to dislike George Haley on sight, I remember, and this should make you feel cozy. Mrs. George Haley finally caught George and Darlene in bed in a demonstration house in Delightful Heights. George had an exclusive listing on the house. After the divorce Darlene’s several large male relatives convinced George it would be nice if he were to remarry. The lovely Darlene has put on thirty pounds, developed a piercing whine, let her hair turn back to mouse, won’t work in the office, is a slob around the house, and is so savagely jealous and possessive she makes the first Mrs. Haley seem like the most liberal of women.
Those nice kids, Bud and Ginny Linder, had twins, and then a single, and now she’s in a delicate condition again. They’re going to go around the world—after the children are grown.
I know you followed the accounts of Jack Engly’s trial. It’s a good thing Jack wouldn’t say a word. Orbie and Lew got up there and testified they saw Rigsby forcing Judy aboard the Angel, and they testified they heard her screaming for help when Jack went aboard. Judy testified that was just the way it happened. After a lot of horse trading by the lawyers, they let it go through as a plea of guilty to manslaughter, so he ended up with time at Raiford. He ought to be out soon. The boat was leased and Judy went off to live with his people. They say that before they took him away, he and Judy made it up.
I guess it was evident to you, Sam, as it was to everybody, that Leo and Christy had a thing for each other. But you don’t know how the marina thing worked out. Those Decklins tried to use the wild party and the killing as an excuse to cut their offering price way down, so Alice took the problem to Leo. He is a mild guy you would think, but by the time he got some hungry lawyers working on the whole thing, those Decklins were ready to admit they’d backed into a hot stove. Leo went in as a partner with Alice, took the marina off the market and arranged to use the money he paid Alice to improve the place.
He went North and wound up his affairs up there and brought his sons down to attend his wedding to Christy.
There have been a lot of improvements, but not too many. The flavor is the same here at D Dock. The place runs smoothly and it makes money and they stick every dime they can back into more improvements. Leo and Christy live aboard the Shifless and the boys live aboard the Ruthless. Nobody wants to move into a house yet. But Christy is bloomingly pregnant, way out to here, and she calls herself “the right man’s burden, or, exemption alley, foe of the revenuers.” So maybe there’ll have to be a house in their future.
Anne is right here asking me if I’m writing a book or a letter. She says it’s the right time of day to go over to the beach for a swim. Sam, this is the third time for me, and the perfect time and the last time. This girl is suitable. You remember how jumpy she was when you met her. I’ve never told you this before, and I wouldn’t tell everybody, but for once in his life, Joe Rykler made the right move.
I took her down to the Keys right after you left. I gave her more steak and bourbon and exercise than she’d ever seen before. I kept her in a state of total exhaustion and relaxation. And on the tenth evening, Sam, she stopped being neurotic about a lot of things and turned into one hell of a lot of woman all of a sudden. So I brought her back and married her and she’s stayed that way.
Well, enough of history, old buddy Let’s get down to the present. I’ve got your revision suggestions on the book, old buddy, and I think you’re crazy as hell. You’re a nit-picker. For example, take another look at your copy of the third chapter and tell me why I should leave out the funniest character in the book.…
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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