Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  He sat for another moment, listening to the silence, smelling the wind off the ocean and the wet vegetation, watching the evening fog bank that lay out over the horizon, drifting in on the onshore breezes. Finally he got out of the car, with the bits of weed still in his pocket, and walked down the trail toward the beach. Halfway down he stopped. There was no point in walking farther. The weeds in question were growing all over the place, thick and green with the fog and the spring rains. He turned around and headed back up to the car, mulling things over in his mind. He knew nearly everything that he needed to know.

  Dalton’s returning his Mastercard and license was interesting. He could as easily have thrown them away. It meant simply that Dalton didn’t care if he knew. He wanted him to know. Dalton was up to something more than merely stealing money from his brother. He was obviously acting out some sort of twisted psychodrama that it would take a team of psychologists to understand. And the theft of the cards was meant to give Mifflin a bigger role in the man’s farce.

  He was suddenly tired of playing Edmund Dalton’s games. He checked his watch: fifteen hours until his bank opened. Plenty of time, if he played it right.

  48

  DAVE POLISHED THE CHROME ON THE KITCHEN FAUCETS with a tea towel and then wiped down the counter before going on to the cupboard doors. The last couple of years of being single had gotten him used to putting in a lot of time alone, sitting up late reading or working in the shop. The few days that he’d known Anne, though, had wiped all that out, and without her company he was restless and marking time. He could remember a couple of times when he had left a girlfriend alone on the beach while he put in a three- or four-hour session out in the water. Now he had a girlfriend who ditched him for a paintbrush….

  The phone rang, and he picked it up anxiously. But it wasn’t Anne’s voice; it was the cigarette-stained voice of the notary from down on Beach Boulevard, and he put the wet tea towel down on the kitchen counter and concentrated.

  “Is this Jim Jones?” the man asked.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “In the flesh.”

  “I’ll make this quick. What you were asking about? All of it’s true. You hit the nail on the head.”

  “Okay …” Dave said. “All of it?”

  “Just what you thought was going on, that’s what was going on. But listen to me; that turns out to be the tip of the goddamn iceberg. You seem like a nice enough guy, so I’m telling you this, but I’m only going to tell you once. My advice hasn’t changed from when we talked last. What I’m telling you here is to keep the hell out of it entirely. You don’t want to be anywhere near it. And if I were you, I wouldn’t have anything to do with our mutual friend. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “Sure. I already have something to do with him. You’re not telling me much.”

  “I’m telling you that he’s a very dangerous man. He’s a first-class nut case. I had to be completely off my chump ever to talk to the man, and now I find myself talking to you, which is just about as bad. Anyway, that’s the end of the conversation. Our hypothetical acquaintance with each other is through. Take my advice, and keep your nose out of a swinging door.”

  Dave was still listening when he realized that the man had hung up. He put the receiver down and stood looking through the kitchen window at the green foliage of his neighbor’s banana trees. Was the phone call a threat? He decided that it wasn’t. It was a man trying to fix something that he had helped to break. Like everyone else, by the time Ray Mifflin had figured out that Edmund Dalton was a spider, he was already tangled up in the man’s webs.

  MIFFLIN’S APARTMENT IN HUNTINGTON BEACH HAD BEEN furnished, which made getting out easy—a couple of quick trips to the Goodwill drop-off, half a dozen cardboard boxes taped up and ready to go to the post office in the morning, and some first-rate Pontiac trunk stuffing. He had left the rest of his junk for the apartment manager with a note to throw what he didn’t want into the Dumpster. To hell with his cleaning deposit and half of his already-paid rent. Right Now Notary was locked up tight. He had mailed in rent for the next four months and closed the Levelors after cleaning out any papers and documents that he cared a damn about. Some time in the next four months, if something changed, he could blow back into town one last quick time and make any final business arrangements—in and out in a day.

  It was still fairly early, nine o’clock in the evening. Mifflin had said a last good-bye to his apartment and business two hours ago and then grabbed a steak at the Sizzler oil Beach Boulevard. He stood now at the pay phone in the lobby of the Embassy Suites hotel in Santa Ana. The hotel lobby was a jungle of potted plants beneath a soaring atrium ceiling. He would have liked to drink a beer in the lounge, just to take the edge off a long day, but it was far too risky. As soon as he hung up the phone, he had to leave. He had a room reserved at a Motel 6 down the freeway in Costa Mesa under the name of Marx. The room he had paid for here at the Embassy Suites was under the name of Frobisher. Making this phone call at all was a long shot, a dangerous long shot, but if he was going to take an early retirement, he had to push his little pile of chips into the middle of the table and play his hand. Edmund Dalton answered the phone on the second ring.

  “Edmund, this is Ray,” Mifflin said to him.

  “It’s good to hear your voice, Ray. What’s up?”

  “I’ve decided to retire, Edmund.”

  “Now that’s not a bad idea. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  “That I ought to retire?”

  “Something like that. Sometimes I think you’re a little too nervous to be a real player. But so what? Who cares what I think? Tell me what you have in mind. You’re talking business. Make me an offer. Let’s not play word games here.”

  “All right,” Ray said. “When this thing got off the ground, you told me you’d buy me out any time I wanted to go. We settled on your paying me half of the balance that you still owed me. I think I called it three-quarters of a pie. The other day when I called and wanted out, you bull-shitted the idea away. I’m talking the same thing here. Only this time, like you said, no word games, no bullshit. You do remember our agreement?”

  “I remember it perfectly. And what you’re telling me now is that you want the famous pie?”

  “That’s most of what I’m telling you. I want the whole pie, though. I don’t want three-quarters of it any more.”

  “You disappoint me a little,” Edmund told him after a couple of moments of silence. “That’s the kind of thing I expected out of a bum like Mayhew, but I’d have guessed you’d be happy with the deal you agreed to. And I’ll admit that I’m a little surprised at your self-righteous tone, when it’s you that’s backing down on the deal after making easy money.”

  “The deal we agreed to was always a myth, Edmund. The hippie brother who hates money was bad enough, but what I read in the newspaper today was worse, way worse.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more. If there’s another baseball strike, I’m turning in my Angels cap. I’ve had it with the sport.”

  “Right. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve had it with the sport too. I agreed to stamp a few papers, Edmund. I didn’t agree to being accessory to a capital crime. This whole thing is out of control.”

  “I’d argue with that. Control is my strong suit, Ray.”

  “You’re not playing it that way.”

  “Things have never been more entirely in control than they are right now.”

  “Not from where I stand. And to tell you the truth, I no longer give much of a damn for anyone else’s opinion, especially yours. So let me get back around to the point. I want you to honor our agreement and cash me out—a full hundred percent.”

  “Honor the agreement? That’s rich, Ray. What if I tell you to go to hell?”

  “Take a wild guess. I told you I’m betting all the chips here, Edmund. You gave me the trump card when you killed Mayhew.”

  “That sounds almost like a threat.”

  “It’s business
. It’s strictly business. And it’s the last piece of business between us, Edmund. You can find another Ray Mifflin easy enough. You found me easy enough.”

  “Well, I hate to hear this. We were a good team. But go ahead and finish your story.”

  “It’s a simple story. I want the rest of the cash—exactly the same amount you’ve already paid me. And I want advance money on the property you haven’t sold yet. That way nothing’s hanging fire. I want it tonight.”

  “Tonight? That’s a tough one. The banks closed three hours ago.”

  “Don’t treat me like a fool, Edmund. You can find the cash. If it costs you a few bucks to buy it from someone, I’ll split the difference with you. Put it in a briefcase and leave it at the desk at the Embassy Suites hotel under the name Frobisher.”

  “That’s it? You’re not going to hold me up for an extra fifty K? You’re not going to run me around from place to place like in the movies?”

  “No running around. No getting greedy. No fuss, no bother. Just one last piece of business, like I said. It’s a quarter past nine. I’d like for the money to be here by midnight. I’ve got a written statement about our business and about your relationship with Mayhew in a very safe, very accessible place. So good-bye, Edmund. Give my regards to your father. I hope he lives another thirty years.”

  He hung up before Edmund had a chance to say another word. Either he would bring the money or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, then nothing would have changed. If he did, then retirement was that much greener.

  Ray realized that his hands were shaking and he was sweating despite the cool air in the lobby. He walked into the lounge after all and ordered a double scotch on the rocks at the bar, then drank it in the time it took him to smoke another cigarette.

  50

  IT WAS NEARLY NINE IN THE MORNING WHEN ANNE GOT out of bed and showered. In the kitchen she put the teakettle on the burner, then walked back into the bedroom. She felt strangely happy, anxious to get to work, and for a moment she wondered why. Somehow it seemed as if something particularly nice were going on today, but as far as she could see it was just another Tuesday.

  And then she remembered what it was: Edmund was on vacation for the week! She opened her closet and stepped inside to find something to wear, and in the semidarkness at the back of the closet she kicked one of the cardboard. Cartons of unpacked clothes that sat on the floor. She groped for the light chain and switched on the overhead bulb, then bent over to push the box out of the way, farther into the disused back corner. She stopped abruptly, though, and straightened up, backing slowly away from the box toward the open door. One of Elinor’s dolls stared up at her from the top of the open box, its lizardlike eyes leering, its mouth slack. One of its clawed hands gripped the box edge; the other held her father’s pocket watch between its legs. The doll’s robe had been pulled up just far enough to expose Elinor’s depraved obsession with sexual anatomy.

  Elinor. Her first thought was of Elinor’s presence in the apartment Sunday night. But what was she suggesting—that Elinor’s ghost had brought the doll along with it?

  Somebody had. With forced calm, she picked the watch up and put it back in the box with her mother’s junk jewelry, then shoved the doll farther down into the box and pulled clothes over it. She found a sweater and a pair of jeans and pulled them on, then picked out a pair of shoes from the floor on the opposite side of the closet. She paused momentarily, looking at the connecting door that led to the law office. Cautiously, as if the door were a wound-up jack-in-the-box, she turned the knob and pushed. The door was locked.

  She was aware now that the teakettle was whistling on the stove, and she shut the closet door and went into the kitchen, carrying her shoes. She poured hot water through the coffee in the filter and sat down at the kitchen table. So if Elinor hadn’t left the doll for her to find, who had? The answer, or at least a possible answer, stared her in the face: Edmund.

  Except how the hell had Edmund gotten into the apartment? The only person besides herself who had been in the apartment was Dave, and the only other person who owned a key was Mr. Hedgepeth. She recalled what Edmund had told her about someone opening her boxes at the Earl’s, and suddenly it was plain as day—a simpleminded, Elinor-type trick. Edmund had opened the boxes and then immediately told her they’d been opened in order to shift the blame, knowing that she’d suspect him. He’d been doing that all along, setting her up, bad-mouthing Dave at every opportunity—his reference to Dave’s obsession with the drowning, his warning that Dave might be “out of line” with her, his suggesting that Dave had some kind of criminal past. For most of it, Edmund might as well have been describing himself. He had been deliberately setting Dave up, setting her up, from the first time she’d spoken to him.

  A knock on the door interrupted her thinking, and she got up and went into the living room before it dawned on her that she might not want to open it. She tiptoed across the floor in her stocking feet and looked out through the peephole. It was Dave.

  She opened the door, and he said, “I thought maybe you’d want to grab a cup of coffee.”

  “Maybe in a minute,” she said. “Would you come in? I want to show you something.”

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, stepping inside and looking around.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Something’s real wrong.”

  51

  “I’M GLAD YOU DIDN’T THINK IT WAS Me Who Put It here,” Dave said. “Did you notice that it’s got a…” He waved his hand helplessly, dripping soapy water on the kitchen counter. Anne was clearly shaken up, and Dave decided to try to lighten the atmosphere while they waited for the police.

  “Yes, I did. That’s what some people call a penis. Elinor made a bunch of these dolls after my mother taught her to sew. She did nearly nothing else for six months or more during the year before she drowned. She was obsessed with the details. Take my word for it. All of them are very nasty, very evil. You wouldn’t think that an adolescent girl would have the skill to make them, let alone want to.”

  “She was obviously talented,” Dave said. He picked up a glass from the kitchen counter and submerged it in dishwater. “I know you said you were jealous of her talent, but was she really as good as you back then?”

  Anne waved the idea away. “I wasn’t any good at all back then, not really. I drew horses and trees. It took years of work for me to paint what I paint now. Lots of wrecked canvas. Elinor didn’t have to work for it. She was a prodigy from around eight years old, like those child math wizards. That was always an irritation, too. I couldn’t see why it came so easy for her and so hard for me.”

  “Sibling envy,” Dave said. He rinsed the glass and held it up to the light. “I read about that in some class in school. I never had a sibling, so I missed out on the fun.”

  “Yeah, envy,” Anne said. “Don’t be so obsessed with getting the dishes clean. I’m starting to get a complex.”

  “You’re starting to get dishwashing envy,” Dave said. "I’m a very particular dish-doer. It’s one of my faults. Anyway, you didn’t have any reason to be jealous. I mean, you couldn’t have been jealous of that” He waved the dish sponge in the general direction of the doll, which still sat out of sight in the closet.

  “I wasn’t. I hated her dolls. It was just effortless for her, that’s all. And on top of that, she was obsessed with these awful subjects. She was just full of this weird darkness. I couldn’t understand it then, and I can’t understand it now. She grew up without a father from the time she was five, but so did I. She wasn’t abused. She wasn’t the victim of a satanic cult. She wasn’t abducted by space aliens. She was just this sort of…conductor for all this evil stuff that surfaced in her art. God knows what she would have produced if she’d lived.” She abruptly stopped talking.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “I sound like I’ve gone mental.”

  “Probably you have. That’s always an option. Didn’t you tell me that? Here. Dry this glass.”

  “No,”
she said. “You read that in your horoscope. Anyway, I was always jealous of her. So you think it was Edmund that put the doll in the closet?”

  “Yeah, of course it was Edmund. There’s no telling what Edmund puts in people’s closets. I just got a phone call from a man who knows him—one of his recent business partners, let’s say. He warned me that Edmund’s both crazy and dangerous, which is something that I’ve known for a long time. I just didn’t know it was serious enough to worry about. I’ve always taken it personally, and I thought it was a weakness.”

  “I’m taking this a little bit personally myself.”

  “Edmund has this habit of leaving what he calls ‘little gifts’ for people,” Dave said. “People he has a particular interest in. Sometimes it’s a dead rat in your lunchbox; sometimes it’s something more elaborate—two or three little goodies arranged like a display in a store window. He thinks he’s artistic.”

  “He told me all about his art. And he wanted to tell me about the astral plane, but I wouldn’t let him.”

  “He thinks you’re some kind of soul mate. He’s serious about you, too. I imagine he’s out of his mind that you and I are seeing each other. He’d take it as a blow to his ego, although he wouldn’t let himself admit it. I should have known he’d get into the boxes you left at the Earl’s.”

  “The boxes would have been easy. The question is, how did he get into my apartment?”

  “He probably just took the key out of your purse. He’s had access to it nearly every day. You’ve spent a couple hours at a time in the theatre while your purse was in the warehouse.”

  “You’re telling me he’d steal my key and break into my apartment just to leave one of these ‘gifts’ of his?”