Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  She giggled. “How do I get there?”

  I told her.

  “Why don’t I rent a car at the airport? We could drive home slowly, stop at country inns and things. I’ve always wanted to stop at country inns.”

  “You have?” I pictured intense Yankee carnality on a creaking four-poster—

  Then she asked me about the status of the stalker, and I told her about Rand Dewy at the airport and how he knew not only that Jellyroll was being stalked but that we were leaving New York on that specific day.

  “The figure skater?”

  “Yeah, he’s the on-screen talent for Celebrity Tonight.”

  “How did he know?…Shelly wouldn’t let it get out, would he?”

  “No.”

  “What about Clayton Kempshall?”

  “No, he’d be afraid of Jellyroll’s clout. He’d never work again. He knows that. Besides, he’s a nice guy. He just wouldn’t do it.”

  “What about Shelly’s detective? Have you talked to him?”

  “The detective is Shelly’s brother-in-law.”

  “No.”

  “Shelly says he’s a retired New York homicide detective.”

  “Do you think we should call in Calabash?”

  “I tried him on Poor Joe Cay. His uncle said he’s at sea.” Then I told her all about the ax murder that had taken place in Micmac.

  “I’m feeling real scared, Artie. Sometimes it comes over me in a wave.”

  “No wonder you couldn’t get any position.” I told her I loved her.

  “Look, there’s not really any point in hanging around here. Maybe I’ll head for Micmac right now. Okay? Maybe I can be there by tomorrow.”

  “I’ll pick you up in my boat.” That was met with silence. “Don’t worry, I’m a master mariner.” We made kissing sounds into the receiver and then hung up. I sighed with expectation.

  “Let’s go for a walk!” I said to Jellyroll. He pronked straight up in the air and bolted out the door. A full day ahead of us, it was time to do some exploring.

  There were two hills on our side of the Crack. The view would be worth the trek to the top of either. I could climb the one that crested in the interior of the island; the trail up its steep flank began near Jellyroll’s woodpile in back. Or I could climb the hill that crested on the coast above the cove. That trail started right below the porch. Jellyroll sprinted off to the woodpile in the general direction of the former, so I followed. His chipmunk friend didn’t make an appearance to taunt him, and he seemed for a moment dispirited, ears dropped. That quickly changed to delight with the new, and he sprinted ahead.

  The trail was well beaten, circling the base of the hill on flat ground through a garden of luxurious, leafy ferns. Jellyroll ran through them, leaving a wake of swaying plants. I wished I could do that. Maybe humans have always envied animals their undampened sensuality and absence of clothes. The trail steepened abruptly. Skull-sized rocks made the going precarious, requiring concentration, even for Jellyroll. We were passing through a thick forest of white pines and a few spruce trees with fat burls, like strange tropical fruit, hanging from trunks and limbs. The forest floor was covered with lichens, mosses, and ferns. It was a sweet forest, welcoming, nonthreatening. However, after about half a mile, the trail expired, and the grade steepened radically. Common sense told me to head back down the way I came. But I didn’t want to do that. I liked the isolation. I liked that the human presence didn’t figure here.

  I climbed on, here and there scrambling on all fours. In stretches bipedalism was impossible. There were still trees and shrubs, there was still soil, but mainly it was a realm of rock. The whole island was a gigantic chunk of rock, fissured, broken, and eroded by eons of ice and wind and water. Sometimes spruce trees grew right out of cracks in the granite as if they’d found a vein of nutrients, a marrow, deep down inside the rock itself.

  Then we came to a place of upheaval. Some force had dislodged great rocks and strewn them around like a petulant child’s toys. Though cracked jaggedly, their sides were often straight. There were cubes and trapezoids, shapes that don’t show up naturally, some the size of steamer trunks and some the size of panel trucks. How did the sides get so straight? Quarrying? Tall spruce trees with tendril roots like tropical creepers disappeared into the cracks between the broken boulders and seemed to be holding them together. I paused on top of a flat one and tried to figure out what I was seeing.

  Jellyroll didn’t care. He was rock hopping, trailing his tongue out the side of his mouth. He yapped at me to hurry up. Dogs are much better equipped for this kind of going. The human center of gravity is too high. A bad step up here, I could break my leg and die of solitude.

  We arrived at a plateau…at least a wide ledge. The flat ground felt good. I was glad to stand up straight. Jellyroll went sprinting after an imaginary chipmunk. The plateau seemed to originate here at this ledge. To the right it widened and curved around the side of the bill. I followed, turned the bend, and suddenly came upon the remains of the Castle.

  It must have been enormous. It was still enormous in a sense. Its shape was outlined by a waist-high foundation wall made of that same round skull-sized rock used in the boathouse foundation. At each of the four corners stood towering rock chimneys, like turrets.

  I went in through an empty doorway, but after two steps I retreated. Lichens, mosses, and tiny evergreen saplings covered jagged rubble from the old fire, smoothed it out, making me think I could walk around inside the walls. The rooms were choked with boards and huge hewn beams, congealed ash and charcoal, chunks of black metal, and things that passing winters had turned to black ooze. Flaming, the place had apparently dropped within its own foundation walls and burned itself out. This was where Clayton had grown up. It must have been tough, being the son of the meanest prick in the county.

  I climbed up on the wall to see what I could see of the interior without actually walking in there. The wall was two feet thick at the top, wider at the base. Some of the interior walls were also made of the local rock, in endless supply along the shore. I could count ten rooms on this level, but I think there were more.

  Around front there appeared to have been a sweeping veranda. Its charred frame timbers remained. It overlooked an open area that, I decided, had once been a great lawn because the trees were clearly younger than the forest around it. This might have been a peaceful place to spend one’s early years looking out on the blue-green ocean, but not if the old man was a psycho.

  One big room near the front, however, was not choked with rubble. In that room, the dirt floor was packed hard and swept clean. Ropes were strung like clotheslines from wall to wall, and on the ropes hung—upside down—row after row of fat marijuana plants. This, I happened to recognize, was top-o’-the-line cannabis sativa. Somebody had taken great care with this crop. It had been nurtured and tended and pruned by hand. I happened to be passingly familiar with the plant because two old friends of mine are hydroponic growers in a loft downtown, near the courthouse. Sarah and Stuart are pros, unapologetic about it, but they’d never hurt anyone. They keep no weapons. If raided, they’d go quietly. I’d heard different about some of these country growers. Some of them held dangerous views about the individual and society. I’d heard horror stories about booby traps and trip wires and trigger-happy sociopaths tending their crops in some of the heavy pot-growing regions like the Hawaiian Islands, northern California, the Smoky Mountains, etc. Of course, I’d heard these stories from professional dopers who sometimes tend to exaggerate.

  Nonetheless, I did a sharp about-face, slapped my thigh for Jellyroll’s attention—I only slap my thigh when it’s important, and he knows that. He gobbled in his tongue and snapped his jaw shut. His head darted. So did mine. We backed out the way we came. We made it to the edges of the ex-lawn—

  “What say?”

  I couldn’t see him…“Look,” I said to the general environment, “I’m just walking here, you know, hiking, I’m just passing through, I’m a gues
t at the boathouse—”

  “It’s okay.”

  But I still couldn’t see him. As far as I knew, he was watching me through cross hairs—

  “Most people from away figure we’re a bunch of inbred murdering moonshiners out here on the islands.”

  “Not me, but I’d feel better if you showed yourself.”

  He stepped out of a thicket on the other side of the collapsed veranda—right where I had been looking without seeing. This guy was part of the environment.

  “I saw you come over with Dwight.” He was about thirty-five, stocky with thick shoulders and arms that hung away from his sides. “Dwight’s functional. Dwight always takes care of Clayton’s guests.”

  “Does he have a lot of guests?”

  “Not enough for Dwight to make a handsome livin’. You’re from New York, right? Same as Clayton. I’d like to go to New York. I went once when I was a child. Every time I went outside something blew into my eye. Big flecks of black things. I couldn’t really identify them.” He wore the same work clothes the salts on the Micmac dock wore—heavy wool pants with suspenders, rubber boots, flannel shirts, with long johns underneath. “I’d like to go back, though.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Go back? Yeah, I could wear goggles this time…Trouble is, my parole officer don’t like me to leave the state.”

  “…You’re on parole, huh?”

  “For takin’ a man’s life. It was one of those meaningless things. You know the kind of thing, bein’ from New York, spur of the moment thing where you take a man’s life.” He watched me sideways, looking for the effect of that talk. “Once taken, you can’t give it back.”

  “A spontaneous killing,” I offered. “You probably didn’t have any choice. Sure.” I looked straight back at him. “Like I said, I’m just passing through.” Jellyroll leaned against my shin and looked warily up at the guy.

  “I’ve known Clayton since childhood,” he said. “We were children together. Runnin’ wild in the woods. These very woods right here. We ran wild in them.”

  I nodded.

  Something was physically wrong with this guy. He held his head turned to the right in a weird way, as if his neck muscles were dysfunctional, or he had some kind of growth in the way. Not everybody is a psychopath, I reminded myself, even if it seems that way. He had enormous hands with short, thick fingers, which he held as if they were about to pick up a wheelbarrow.

  “Well, I guess we’ll be strolling on. Let’s go, boy.”

  “Of course we’re from different classes, Clayton and I. Where do you know him from?”

  “He was in one of my dog’s movies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This dog is in the movies.”

  “No shit?”

  “None. And TV. The R-r-ruff Dog.” Ex-R-r-ruff Dog, but it wasn’t necessary to go into that.

  “Like Rin-Tin-Tin?”

  “Yeah.” Keep it simple. This guy had never even heard of Jellyroll. I liked that. It’s unusual to find someone in the industrialized world who hasn’t at least heard of the R-r-ruff Dog. “Was this Kempshall’s mansion?” I asked.

  “This was the Castle. These movies—your dog is the star of these movies?”

  I nodded. “Clayton was in one.”

  “Wow. Who’d he play?”

  “An…evil high school principal.”

  “Was he good?”

  “Excellent.”

  He had a far-off look on his face, imagining, I thought, Clayton as an actor, or as a human being in the world, or as an evil high school principal. There had been something between them, running wild in the woods.

  “What happened to the Castle?”

  “Arson.”

  It was right about then—“arson”—that I saw the other side of his face. The entire right side—from his hairline down to the hinge of his jaw, including his ear—had been fried. Layer covered layer of scar tissue. It looked like the gold braid naval officers wear, except that it was mostly flesh-colored with vague, thin purple streams running through it. His ear was melted down into a little bud the size of a thumb knuckle. The ear hole was still there. He peered hard at me, as if waiting to see what I was going to make of it.

  “…Did anybody get hurt?”

  “Compton Kempshall—Old Man Kempshall—he got killed. ’Course that fucker deserved it.”

  “Everybody seems to agree on that,” I said.

  “Yeah? Who? Dwight?”

  “Clayton himself said so.”

  “Really? When was this?”

  “Last week. He didn’t go into any details, but that’s what he said.” I was just trying to hold up my end of the conversation.

  “The Selfs is the peons, and the Kempshalls is the aristocrats.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Who? Old Man Kempshall? Fried to a fuckin’ crisp.”

  “He died in the fire?” Hadn’t Dwight and Clayton told me his body never was found?

  “…He was dead before the fire got started. At least he looked dead to me. Of course I was just a kid at the time. I’d never really seen a dead guy before. Maybe he was partly alive. Maybe there was like a glimmer of life left. After I whacked him with my trusty Cub Scout hatchet.”

  I didn’t want to know that. Even if it wasn’t true. I wanted to keep things light. That’s why we were here. We were here to relax and hide out for a couple of weeks or so. We didn’t need to get involved in any ancient hatchet murders. Especially not alone out in the woods with the guy confessing to it, the guy drying his dope in the ruins of his victim’s castle. Far too weird.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Artie Deemer.” Jellyroll was leaning against my leg the way he leans when he’s nervous. “What’s yours?”

  “Hawley Self.”

  If this were New York I’d naturally assume he’d made that up, but this was not New York. “How do you do, Hawley?”

  “Say, Artie?”

  “That’s your boat in the cove?”

  “Yeah, that’s where I live. Aboard.”

  I wondered if he lived in the boathouse when it was guest-free. “Dwight says you’re a sea urchin diver.”

  “It ain’t a good time for fishin’, but it’s a good time for urchins. They’re out there by the fuckin’ billions. Japs buy from me in Micmac, little peckers. Twelve hours later some electronics magnates is slurpin’ them up in Tokyo. Say, let me ask you. You wouldn’t have connections in New York who might want to buy top-grade urchins? Like for restaurants, coffee shops?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Yeah, too bad. I’m lookin’ for a wider outlet, since there’s so many urchins. It’s a problem, though, since they taste like a gob of tuberculosis snot.”

  “I’ll bet the water’s cold.”

  “You think it’s cold on the surface. It’s fuckin’ toasty compared to the bottom.” He slid a spliff the size of a toilet paper roller out of his vest pocket and put a match to it. “Smoke?”

  “No, thanks.” I used to smoke some doo-dah while listening to music or while not listening to music, but I stopped, mostly. It was not making my edge any keener.

  “A guy comes and stumbles on your stash and goes, ‘No, thanks’? That’s opposed to the code.”

  “The code?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What code?”

  “The code.”

  Okay, so we smoked. It was clearly something special. My friends Sarah and Stuart would speak quietly in its presence. I sat down on a chunk of round rocks still cemented in a mass.

  “Are you the gardener?” I asked.

  “Pretty excellent, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I certainly would.”

  “Yeah, this is the best crop yet, but the pressure’s gettin’ too hot. The long dick of the law. Too bad, I was just learnin’ what I was doing. I’ve always been interested in growin’ things. I see you’re interested in wildflowers.”

  I was carrying the guide to wildfl
owers. “I am, but I don’t know anything about them.”

  “There’s a lot of them. My mother cooks with them some-times…So is Clayton comin’ up?”

  “I don’t think so. He went to California.”

  “California, huh? L.A., I suppose. Beverly Hills. So he just said, ‘I got this rustic place on this backward island, why don’t you borrow it, laugh at the locals?’ ”

  “He didn’t laugh at the locals. I’m here because somebody’s stalking my dog,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know what a stalker is?”

  “Like a hunter?”

  “It has a special meaning. It means a nut who follows celebrities. Sometimes the nut kills the celebrity.”

  “No shit? Why?”

  “For publicity. It usually doesn’t happen with dogs.”

  “Somebody’s tryin’ to kill this dog?”

  “Maybe.” I told him about the stalker because I wanted a local ally. Dwight was an ally, but he didn’t live on the island itself. Even if this Hawley Self didn’t care to be my ally, I wasn’t taking much of a risk telling him. A guy who’s never even heard of Jellyroll isn’t going to call the nearest TV station to sell them the news that Jellyroll has arrived.

  “So you mean you’re hidin’ out here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, look, if I see any stalkers, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thanks, I’d appreciate that—”

  Hawley saw something in the woods to my left, beyond the front of the ex-Castle. I looked that way. So did Jellyroll. Something had moved over there.

  “Dickie, goddamnit, get over here!” Hawley sprang up and started after the apparently universally loathed Dickie. Maybe there’s one on every island. “Look, this joker is my partner.” He waved an arm that included the entire ruins, but I took the gesture to refer to the curing weed. “Of course, only a total asshole’d have him for a partner. Excuse me, okay, Artie? It was nice meetin’ you. I’ll see you around. How long are you around for?”

  “It’s kind of up in the air.”

  “Well, then I’ll see you around.” He started off at a jog, but he put on the brakes, turned, paused, then said, “Say, Artie, have you seen Clayton?”