And the Girl Screamed (Prologue Crime)

by Gil Brewer

  REDDICK’S

  Bait—Boats

  Beer

  Well, I’d sold the bait. I had drunk most of the beer, waiting for this morning. There were still a few bottles left in the cooler, but I wanted something a lot stronger than beer. Only I wasn’t going to get that, because I had to meet Eve tonight, and maybe I wanted Eve a hell of a lot more than I wanted beer, or anything else with alcohol in it.

  The property was composed of three acres, fenced in, thick with jungle. My father had left it to me when he died. I’d been happy to get it, but never happy enough until this past year, when I needed it. There had been a four-room cottage on the land down by the water, with a pier of sorts. I had made it into a fish camp, and done all right.

  Big Bayou angles off Tampa Bay. Look at it in the right light, with a slightly beery eye, and it could be the Amazon or a narrow tributary. There are alligators in Big Bayou. I had to shoot a bull once that measured nine feet from snout to tail tip, and that’s good-sized for down here. Good-sized anyplace, maybe. He’d gulped down the better part of three pet dogs that had prowled from their owners’ yards.

  The house sat in a clump of bamboo with a background of cypress. There were three rooms and a screened porch. I had ten boats and did a fair business, only I hadn’t planned on continuing and a guy was going to buy the boats, so I might end up eating the few shrimp I had left.

  I parked the car in the side yard under a slash pine, and walked down to the pier. It was really hot. There was a mist on the still water, sluicing in under the mangroves across the way. I stood on the pier and breathed it all in, trying not to think about them back there at headquarters. They were probably still talking.

  It was like being clubbed over the head and socked in the heart with a brick. Call it whatever the hell you like. I don’t care. All I knew right then was that I had wanted to be a cop all my life and now it was shot. Shot because a couple of cruddy, overrighteous bastards were off on a be-honest-with-yourself kick. If I hadn’t been able to shoot a gun it would have been different—but I could shoot a gun.

  It wasn’t Doc Maston’s fault. He said what he had to say, that was all. He’d told the truth, only he had hesitated at exactly the wrong moment. Thayer had gobbled that like a starved pup and Calvin had salted it into his notes along with the rest of the junk he kept tabbed and ready.

  The chief hadn’t wanted it to turn out like that.

  Well, what do you do, Reddick?

  I went over to the icebox and found a bottle of beer, thought about the bottles in the cooler, opened this bottle and stood there drinking it. I got it down to half, put it down on the table and went into the bedroom.

  I had been going to say to hell with this place; I’d been going back to duty on the force, and Eve would swing the divorce, and everything would be okay. What would I tell her now?

  I went back into the kitchen and finished the beer, opened another, and returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed. Eve—Eve. Mrs. Edward Thayer. Does he know?

  If he did know, it would probably be sweet. He should know by now, only she hadn’t told him beyond the fact that there was another guy. At least, not to my knowledge. If he had known this morning, he’d kept it an unpleasant secret. Only I wasn’t housebreaking—I was housemaking. He had never loved Eve, and had said as much.

  I got up and went to the window and looked out at the bamboo and the front end of the coupe cooling under the sparse shade of the pine.

  • • •

  For fourteen months I hadn’t been a cop. They’d given me a kind of dribble of a pension during that time, and I hadn’t felt guilty taking it, because I’d been going to make up for that. I had come up from the bottom, like Grandpa, only it had been the way I wanted it. I had wanted to learn it up and down and crosswise, and I had.

  Eve and I had known each other a long time, since before I was a rookie patrolman, pounding Central Avenue to a concrete and asphalt pulp. Before she was married, that was—before Edward Thayer had taken his horn-rims off and waved them under her nose and said, “Let’s.”

  I hadn’t known and neither had she, and being truthful, which she was, she didn’t know why in hell she did it. She had ceased to be awed by the circumstance of her mistake not more than an hour or so after the marriage took place.

  Only looking at it squarely, both of us knew why she did it. I had been the very busy bright new cop, busy keeping a shine on my badge, sharp press in my serge, oil on my gleaming .38. Thoughts of marriage and a future aside from the force hadn’t occurred to me. It was different with Eve.

  Along came Thayer—handsome, suave, and bold enough to go after what he wanted the moment he saw it. He saw it in Eve. She was impressed by him, his background, his social prominence, and bowled off her feet by his whirlwind campaign to get her. It was only later on that she saw his cold-blooded reasoning, that marriage to a pretty “town girl” would help his political career. Eve and I had drifted apart, and I didn’t see her for almost a year.

  By then she’d found that Thayer was all suave pretense, jealous of his reputation, fearful that a breath of scandal should ever touch his life.

  “I was an idiot, Cliff,” Eve told me. “I guess I was blinded by the attention he paid me, by his money and his ambition. We’d never had enough, really, to get along on—all my family had was a big old house and a very good name. Anyhow, when he turned up after my folks died, I thought I loved him. He had the wealth I thought I needed—and I had the connections he wanted. My father had been a judge for many years, and our name was politically advantageous.”

  I saw more and more of Eve, and we finally got around to mentioning divorce from Thayer. I wondered how he’d take it—and I wondered if he knew about Eve and me….

  I went over to the bureau and looked at myself in the mirror. Ex-cop, I thought.

  Then I stripped and walked naked down to the pier—the hell with whoever might come along—and dove into the water.

  • • •

  I floated out there, staring up at the sky. It was white, and the sun was even whiter.

  Christ, how I loved that woman! She was mine, my woman, just as my hide was mine. She loved me the same way, and we were sure getting it straight up and down. And was all of this doing her any good?

  I floated some more, then turned over and started swimming down the bayou. The water was fine, cool, and not a bit fishy. The tide was coming in; you could feel the pull. I came around the bend, churning it good and hard, really reaching out, and a couple of babes were flattened on a diving board off a long green lawn in front of an expensive place. There were a blonde and a redhead, both put together sweetly. The redhead wore a green towel and the blonde wore nothing.

  They sat up, then grabbed things and covered up. Then they began laughing. They pointed at me and laughed like hell. I quit swimming and treaded water, watching them.

  Well, they rocked with laughter.

  Then I saw what was the matter. I was swimming in the shade of a big old banyan that came down by the water, and they could see I was in the raw myself.

  “Let’s have a party!” the redhead called.

  I waved to her and started swimming straight at them.

  They began pulling things on, and then got up and ran across the lawn. They stopped by a thick, stubby hedge of Australian pine and turned to look.

  “Don’t say that unless you mean it,” I said.

  They turned and ran again.

  I swam back out into the bayou, and turned toward home. I felt let down and lousy. I’d forgotten trouble for a minute.

  I began to wonder again how much good this was doing Eve, this waiting and hoping and meeting nights and sneaking out to the beaches, just to be together for a few hours, maybe. It was right, but it was wrong—because it couldn’t hurt me only it could raise hell with her.

  I was pooped by the time I reached my pier. I climbed out and shook off and went over to the cooler and found a bottle of Red Cap, and went into the house. I lit a smok
e and headed for the bedroom and sat on the bed, dripping a little.

  Those two girls down there. They had been damned young. Thinking back, they had been about fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Really put together, though. And suddenly I knew they had been drunk. I hadn’t noticed it, or it hadn’t registered at the time. But now I realized it. There had been a looseness to the redhead’s face, especially. That young, and corking off. I’d seen too much of it not to catch it, and I should have caught it quicker.

  This town was getting hot on the delinquent kick. There’d been a lot of it in the papers ever since The Blackboard Jungle showed at the movie houses. The stands were stripped of the book, and just the last week one of the high schools got torn apart and the hall walls painted up with gang names—the Red Snakes and the Black Clouds. Kids would be kids, but the past few years it sometimes got so it would scare you.

  I finished the beer, scraped the cigarette out on the floor, lay down and fell asleep. It was hot and sticky, and that’s the kind of sleep it was, too.

  Chapter Three

  EVE WAS LATE meeting me. I parked the coupe down the block and waited. Palm fronds stirred in the saffron glow of a street light on the corner and I sat there smoking, musing on how hellish it was. It should have been simple and good and right, because that’s how it was with Eve and me. Just perfect, that was all—perfect to a point, then all shot to hell again, like a dropped Ming vase.

  I saw her coming then, and the way she was running, I knew something was up. She came down across the lawn in front of her place, and along the sidewalk, holding her skirt. God, I was glad to see her. It ate right down into me. I could feel it all the way down, mingled with a sick feeling that was good in its way, too. I held the door open and she jumped in beside me, her white dress swirling up around her legs.

  “Get going, Cliff!”

  Not loudly. Just a little anxiously.

  “Sure.”

  We took off. I headed down the street under the oaks and took, the first right up a street under more oaks, toward Ninth. She was quiet, but I could hear every breath she took. Say what you will, there’s that feeling about what you’re doing. No matter how damned uninhibited you are, or how unconventional, or how damned right you know you are. There’s that feeling—another guy’s property; hands off, Jack. And you’ve got to rationalize it, no matter who you are. So I rationalized again, listening to her breathe, and seeing her knees there in the dashlight, and her hands smoothing her dress over the knees—and knowing she was that close again. The way it should be and wasn’t, really. That’s always there in the back of your mind, too, and you try never to think of their bedroom in the dark after you go home. And smelling her, too, the perfume she wore and the warmth of her and the closeness and wanting it right all the way. Now. Every day.

  We came onto Ninth and she still didn’t speak.

  I turned on Central and headed for the beaches out on the Gulf. I hadn’t really looked at her yet. I saved that, like dessert.

  “What’s the matter, Eve?”

  “I’m scared.”

  She came over next to me, sliding smoothly close, and put her left hand up under my arm and pressed with her side and I could feel the round soft thrust of her breast. She put her right hand on her left and squeezed tight. Her leg lay against mine.

  “Scared of what?” I said.

  “Scared, Cliff—just scared.”

  We drove along that way for a while, past the neon lights on Central. Past the gin mills, the alleys with shapes in them, the long glass-fronted stores closed for the night, the sounds of juke-boxed laughter, and the theaters and the gleaming silent cars along the curbs.

  “Tell me.”

  “Edward’s found out about us, Cliff.”

  I felt a touch of excitement. I’d known it had to come some time.

  “Oh, Cliff!” she said. “He’s been awful!”

  “He would be. Take it easy, now.”

  “He warned me not to see you.”

  I tried to relax. I should have been able to, because I’d done a lot of thinking about this moment. The fact was we had planned to come out with it and tell him flatly, anyway. The argument had been about who should do the deed? I hadn’t thought she should, because of what she might have to take from the guy. I wanted to tell him, and I felt it was right, only I hadn’t. Now it was out anyway. Edward Thayer was prominent in town, and he could cause plenty of trouble. But Eve and I loved each other, and there wasn’t much you could do about that.

  “He won’t give me a divorce,” she said. Her voice began to take on a very contained shrillness, Eve usually held things under control, but I detected the fright in her now. “Says the scandal would ruin him.”

  “Look,” I said. “It’s a nice night. Let’s save it. We can talk it over when we get out to the beach. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “But, Cliff. It’s such a mess!”

  “I know.”

  I patted her knee, looked over at her and grinned. Her thick blonde hair was puffing a little at the edges and catching light from somewhere. She wore a thin cloth coat over her dress. She tried to smile back at me, without much success. Then she wiggled still closer to me and neither of us said anything for a while.

  I drove on through town and across the causeway and we came down the main beach road. It was one of these deep blue star-studded Florida nights, when headlights on the highway sparkle wickedly bright, and pleasing music from nowhere layers the wind like delicate icing on a cake of nostalgia.

  “It’s a nice night,” I said again.

  “Don’t, Cliff—it won’t help.”

  “All right. But it’s still a nice night. Look at it.”

  “I know it is. I know it is, and that’s what makes it hurt all the more.”

  “Don’t let it hurt.”

  “You say that, but it hurts you, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s so good to be with you, Cliff.”

  “Double for me.”

  “Don’t try to make me feel good. I feel terrible.”

  “Take it easy.”

  We drove along the beach road. Pretty soon we reached the spot where we always turned off, along a stretch of white sand. I knew exactly where the patrol cars checked regularly, and this spot wasn’t one of them. Not many, if any, knew of it. You wouldn’t even think there was a place to drive a car in here. If it had been known, it would have been like a silent drive-in movie. The tires hissed, and long, dry grass finger-tipped the fenders. I pulled the car over beside a stand of six raddled cabbage palms, turned the ignition off and set the hand brake. We were in the shadow of the palms and the ceaseless chatter of near-rigid fronds was loud. A cool wind drew through the car, blowing the hot day away. Back on the highway gleaming cars wooshed, zoomed and honked toward festivity.

  We sat in the darkness and listened to all of it. The car creaked. On the other side of us, the ground leveled out and tall Australian pines bent, moaning. Straight ahead, between low-lying dunes, was the beach and the Gulf of Mexico, and the tiny place in eternity where we could be together without having to dodge behind Venetian blinds at the sound of footsteps.

  “Well?” she said.

  I looked at her. Her face was white in the shadows, and I restrained an impulse to take her in my arms right then. I grabbed the folded blanket and the thermos of Martinis and we went on down to the beach. We liked Martinis, and we took turns fixing them. She usually had a hell of a time sneaking a bottle past Edward.

  On the beach, she stood holding the thermos while I spread the blanket out. It was a really beautiful night, and it was choked full of something I didn’t get, and didn’t like. She was acting sort of strange and cool and it began to get me.

  “You all right?” I said.

  “Yes. I’m fine.”

  We sat on the blanket in the moonlight coming across the Gulf in a broken splatter of moving white. The Gulf lapped quietly at the sands. You could smell the salt and the wind was cottony and it mi
ght have been perfect. I started opening the thermos.

  “Wait, Cliff. Anybody’d think you bring that along to prime me.”

  “Easy, now—you know better than that.”

  She had never said that, and her saying it snapped the ritual. I tightened the cap back on the thermos and set it aside. The hell with the Martinis. To me it had always been a kind of impatient breaking of hope, anyway.

  I looked at her and she was watching me, but when she caught my eye, she turned away.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She didn’t answer. She was sitting with her legs under her, propped on one hand, the moonlight bright on her hair, shining in her eyes as she looked at me now. Her mouth was very dark, though you couldn’t see the firm red of her lips, only the shape, and that was enough. Her face was oval, and the texture of her skin was soft and clean. Tall, she had the body to go with her height. Her breasts were large, her waist very slim, her hips something I often dreamed about. Whenever she moved, I moved a little, too. The throat of her dress was slashed deep between her breasts, rolling open and without buttons, only her body holding it there the way it should be. Her white dress looked somehow whiter and she was still trying to smile. Normally Eve was able to believe we were doing the right thing, but I knew her husband had really got to her.

  “I’m sick, Cliff,” she said. “I didn’t want anything to spoil it tonight.”

  “Nothing’s going to spoil it,” I told her.

  She shook her head slowly.

  “It’s just coming out into the open,” I said, “the way it should be.”

  We watched each other for a time.

  “He’s mad,” she said. “Real mad—crazy. He knows everything. He caught on to where we meet, followed me the other evening. He got the license number on your car and had it checked. He knows all about us.”

  “That makes us even,” I said, thinking about today at headquarters, and him standing there and not saying a word, holding it all in—just giving me the polite businesslike business. In his own way—in his own time. Edward Thayer. All that time he had known. Her voice was a shade too expressionless. “He knows how you used to be a cop, I mean—like—”