by Brewer, Gil
We made the pier and walked slowly. One of the cops stood looking our way, his arms folded, rocking on his heels. He couldn’t make out who we were at this distance.
The girl in the cream-colored suit paused as another cop called to her, moved toward her, talking.
I said, “Easy, now. We’ve got to make that red outboard. Jump for it. Make it look as normal as possible. I’ll unhook the line. Get up in the bow.”
She didn’t speak. We reached the boat. She jumped, landed rocking wildly. Water splashed over the sides.
“Hey, there!” one of the cops called. He walked slowly toward the pier. The cop talking with the girl, turned, gave a yell and ran toward the sea wall.
“Sit tight,” I said.
I snagged the line, whipped it free, and leaped into the boat. If the motor didn’t catch, we were sunk. The sound of that motor would be my excuse later on.
I shoved away from the pier, grabbed the starting rope. I tried to make it all look as ordinary as possible. Very likely it looked like two people trying to escape the police. I whipped the starting rope. The motor coughed twice.
“Hey!” a cop called.
The motor caught, roared violently. I shoved the throttle hard over. The motor blasted into the graying day.
The two cops ran toward the pier. Ivor Hendrix was facing me, clutching the sides with white-knuckled hands, the white purse pinned between her bare knees.
The boat lay on its side as I turned and picked up speed. We walloped the water of the bay, clearing the pier, running close in against the side of the Carol. I glanced back. They were running along the pier, waving. One of them had drawn his gun. He wouldn’t use it. They would never be certain I’d heard them call.
In no time at all every beach entrance would be watched. They’d have the Coast Guard ‘copter out looking for this red outboard.
I felt trapped now. I had to come up with something, and fast. Otherwise, they would eventually find me, and whatever plans I’d had for this town would go up the flue like thin black soot. My chance to locate Hendrix was gone. Whoever was coming for Ivor could have led me to her husband. I’d been unable to take that route.
She sat there watching me, clutching the sides of the boat, her hair gusting in snarls around her pale face, her skirt twisted up across the smooth white thighs.
We approached a narrow finger of land. I cut in around that. Through trees, I saw a road. A police cruiser tore along the road, siren wailing, headed toward Maximo Point. I cut in close to shore. The car vanished. The motor was still wide open.
Out here we were vulnerable. We raced violently past fishing piers now. Suddenly the shoreline changed to jungle. I saw the opening of a mangrove-clotted bayou. I swung in there.
Choppy water changed to grass, and we vaulted snags and roared under a bridge. I slowed the motor, staying well in to shore. Another cruiser flashed across the bayou bridge.
We were on the south side of town. The shoreline changed, and I saw homes set back among trees; the jungle landscape turned to cared-for lawn.
I veered the boat toward a vacant lot, ran it aground. Ivor Hendrix cried out, flipped backward, and sprawled off the seat. Her long legs flashed awry. She righted herself, and we leaped over the side together, landing on silty ground. Fiddler crabs scrambled in rustling waves for their burrowlike homes.
It had been a long time since I’d lived in this town. I remembered this area as pure jungle. It had changed. I didn’t know exactly where we were. We ran up across somebody’s front lawn and reached a pink cement road.
“We’ll have to find a phone,” I said.
She breathed heavily, her face sheened with perspiration. The auburn hair was darker at the temples, thickly snarled. I knew people along the bayou would report the red outboard, because the police would probably be airing this on TV.
I said, “We’ll use a phone in somebody’s home. I’ll get a cab and take you someplace. Another motel—that’ll give me a little time, anyhow.”
We approached a long low white house with a Volkswagon sitting in the gravel drive. I thought of stealing the car. It wouldn’t turn the trick.
I rang the bell on the front porch. Ivor Hendrix did quick things to her hair and brushed with finicky strokes at dirt on her skirt.
I experienced a brief moment of dark futility, like being shot at from point-blank range. Then I was all right.
A middle-aged man carrying a newspaper, wearing khaki walking shorts, horn-rimmed glasses, and smoking a pipe, answered the door.
“Could we use your phone?” I said. “Car broke down. I was going to walk to a garage, but there doesn’t seem….”
“No garage around here,” he said. “Sure. Come in.”
We went inside. Ivor Hendrix was as nervous as a cat. She bumped into the corner of a table, gasped, and the man looked at her. He showed me the phone and stood there, banging the newspaper against his leg, blowing smoke.
I called a cab. They said they would be right out. We started for the door. Her eyes were like broken glass.
“Why don’t you wait here?”
“Thanks. We’ll wait outside.”
We went out and crossed the drive and moved down to the curb. We stood under the fragrant shade of a camphor tree, and she leaned back against the trunk, avoiding my eyes, gripping the white purse with both hands, her teeth nibbling her lower lip.
“I keep thinking of Vince,” she said. “I can’t seem to forget how he looked, lying there. I keep thinking everything’s my fault. I can’t get it out of my head. I tried to be a good wife to Carl—it didn’t work. What could have happened to him? What’s he trying to do? Where is he?”
“Money changes people,” I said. “Four hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. That’s what’s behind all this. The rest doesn’t matter. Everything else was just a kind of fuse. It’s curious, though, how things happen to people who are ripe for it.”
Her eyes widened. “How do you mean that?”
I shrugged. “Everybody I’ve run into on this thing has been sitting on a keg of emotional dynamite.”
“Me, too?”
“You, too. Everybody has his own little world. What he forgets is that sometimes his world has windows. Others like to look in and watch.”
“You think the Laketown robbery really has something to do with this?”
“I know it,” I said. “The trouble is, that’s about all I do know. Vince Gamba was trying to tell me he thought he knew where money was buried. What money? The four hundred thousand dollars? All I can figure is, whoever had it doesn’t have it any more. Somebody else has it, and maybe has buried it. But why would they kill him—unless it was so he wouldn’t talk. Maybe he talked first. Maybe the money isn’t buried any more. Maybe it was never buried. Who knows?”
“You’re going to find out, though, aren’t you?”
“I’ve got to find out.” I looked at her. “It’s my neck if I don’t. It could be your neck, too.”
“You’re doing an awful lot for me.”
“For myself, too.”
“Yes, but for me.”
I reached over and took her hand. “I like doing it for you,” I said. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
A cab turned the corner down the street and lightly beeped its horn.
From a distance, roofing the cloud-darkening forenoon, the keening sound of a siren reached us.
Her fingers tightened on my hand. “Lee?”
“Yeah?”
“This is the first time I’ve ever felt secure, protected. It’s you, Lee. You’re such a wonderful guy.”
“I wish to hell you hadn’t said that.”
“It’s how I feel.”
“It’s going to be damned hard to live up to.”
“I mean it.”
For a minute, there, I thought the sun was shining. Then the cabby called to us. “You coming, or ain’t you coming?”
TWENTY
I TOOK IVOR HENDRIX to a hotel called Vista Gr
oves. It was a murky leftover of the twenties, hanging by dirty fingernails and threadbare carpets to the tarnished glitter of a vanished past. The four once-white clapboard stories hunched ghostlike in one of the more elderly residential districts. It was still inhabited by what remained of a few aged pioneering citizens with faces like yesterday’s paper dolls, limber only in their memories.
“This room gives me the creeps,” she said, looking around at the chairs with dusty antimacassars, the old spool bed, the gold-filigreed gingerbread-heavy dressing table with a mirror so clotted with bygone images it was too tired to reflect today. The room’s single bow to modernity was a clashing overhead light fixture. It was a large opaque white glass globe that looked somehow obscene against the cracked, yellow plaster of the ceiling. Around the edges of the ceiling were frescoed flowers. The flowers wept moisture down the high walls in places, like the sparse, crystal tears of the dying.
“You won’t be here forever,” I said. “And nobody’ll find you. That clerk downstairs doesn’t even know what year it is.”
She sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. We had stopped at Woolworth’s and bought two cheap cardboard suitcases. I‘d told the clerk she was my sister and that she had come to Florida for an indefinite stay. He was charmed. She had registered as Helen Spencer. It looked legitimate.
“What does ‘vine tree’ mean?” I said, standing by the door. “I heard you say it over the phone to Elk.”
Her face was blank. She shook her head slowly. “You must’ve misunderstood something.” She frowned. “I can’t imagine what it could have been. I didn’t say anything like that, I’m sure.”
“You feel any better? As frightened as you were?”
“You make me feel secure.”
We watched each other. I looked her over quietly, and her cheeks picked up some dusty pink. She lifted the edge of the dusty bedspread nervously, to be doing something, and looked at the sheet. She dropped the spread into place and looked up at me again. The eyes were very dark blue, almost black, and they looked hot. The shape of her mouth was suddenly soft and red. Her breasts moved richly with the way she breathed. The dress she wore was filled like a sunshot plum, and my throat thickened, watching her.
She could be a lot more than her sister. We both knew what we were both thinking.
“What’s the matter?” she said, knowing very well what was the matter.
I rubbed my hand across my face. “Nothing.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this. The police don’t like you now, do they?”
I didn’t speak.
“What will they do to you?”
“Christ knows,” I said. “I’ve played it all wrong. Instead of working with them, I’ve worked against them, and now I’m up to my ears.”
“Can’t you go to them and straighten it out?”
“It would leave me a lot worse off than I am.”
“I’d think they would understand if you explained.”
“Yeah. It’s a good clean way to think.”
“It seems awfully long since yesterday afternoon.”
“Doesn’t it?”
Her eyes lidded self-consciously. “What are you planning?”
I went to the door and took hold of the doorknob, hard. “Not what you think,” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I looked back at her. She was staring at me wide-eyed. She half smiled. “I wish you’d explain that.”
“I’d like to hear myself, too.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
She brushed at the edge of her skirt on her knee with the backs of her fingers. “I don’t like staying here all alone. I’m frightened—something inside me keeps telling me something’s going to happen. Couldn’t you stay with me a while?” She looked at me crisply.
“That the only reason you want me to stay? Because you’re frightened?”
“I don’t think so.”
I opened the door.
“I think you’re terrific,” she said. “You’re a little crazy, too. Did you know that?”
“Somebody tells me that at least once every day.”
“I still think you’re terrific.”
I opened the door a little more, not feeling at all terrific. I felt lousy, even letting her say that. She didn’t know what a bastard I was. “I want you to stay right here,” I told her. “Don’t go any place. Sit here and wait.”
“Okay. You know something? You’re very tall and straight. It reminds me of the books I used to read about the pioneers and Indian hunters. Tall and straight as an arrow.”
“I’m happy not to return the compliment, if that’s what it was, and it shouldn’t be. I’ll be back for you soon.”
“You’d better,” she said. “Know what I mean?”
“I’ll take a wild guess and say yeah.”
“Will you get a shave before you come back?”
“Do I need a shave?”
“Yes.”
“Indian hunters never shaved. You want me to get a shave?”
“No.”
This could go on all night. I went out into the hall and closed the door. I closed it gently. Then I walked down the hall. I didn’t see or recall a single thing until I stood outside on the sidewalk.
Asa and Ivor. A pair of sisters if ever a pair was.
TWENTY-ONE
MY HEAD began to pain worse than yesterday. I started walking for the nearest U-Rent-It car emporium. A thin sticky mist fell from the dark blanket of sky. Everybody on the street had suddenly become an informer to the police. They all knew I was trying to hide. The sound of a radio or TV was a siren. I was a mess.
I dodged into a stand-up lunch counter, ordered coffee and a hamburger that should have been used as a tire on a foreign sports car, and swallowed four more of the yellow tablets the drugstore pharmacist had sold me for my head. Nothing seemed to happen.
There was a round mirror behind the coffee urn. I got a look at myself. I looked as if I’d been shot out of a cannon and the powder charge was a bit heavy.
My eyes were like fifty-caliber bullet holes in a cypress plank. I had been wearing a tie. The knot was swiveled up under my collar wing. The collar itself looked as if some patient ghoul had rubbed tobacco juice into it over a period of days. I started combing my hair with my fingers, struck a tender spot and nearly collapsed with the pain.
Leaning against the counter, I clawed two more of the yellow tablets from the bottle, and fondly gulped them with the last of the coffee. I lit a cigarette, took two drags, and suddenly couldn’t see anything. Everything was totally dark. My ears rang. I was stone blind.
I held to the counter, tried not to panic.
In the midst of this I knew what had become of the body. There was no thought to it. It simply struck me, and there it was. Don’t tell me the subconscious can’t carry its share of the load.
“Something wrong?” somebody asked.
“No,” I said. “Just thinking. I’m fine.”
They didn’t speak again. I would never know who it was. I wouldn’t care a hell of a lot, either.
Vince Gamba had found the body. He had been in love with Ivor, worried about her being mixed up in something bad, and taken the body someplace. It had to be that.
I stood there. The world was an underground midnight. I had to move. I couldn’t move. I tried to be nonchalant about the whole thing.
I had no head again. I couldn’t see, but of course you have to pay for small considerations. There was no pain anywhere in me. I was as light as a feather, with a sense of well-being like these guys lying in an alley propelled to the other side of paradise on canned heat.
“You better call the hospital,” somebody whispered. A corner of light winked in my left eye. A shade began to go up. I began walking blearily, as fast as I could.
“Sir?” somebody called. “Sir?”
I kept walking, out into the street, down in the general direction of the U-Rent-It place. As I walked,
my sight cleared and I could see again. Maybe not as well as formerly, but then, what can you expect?
I laughed sharply, took out the bottle of yellow tablets and shot the bottle high out over Central Avenue. I heard it bong off the top of a car, then smash on pavement. I felt better.
I had a pale chance. Anemic, in fact. If either the police, or watermelon-head got to me first, I was cooked crisp. It was probably watermelon-head who had called Ivor on the Carol. Only how had he known she was there?”
Elk Crafford? I didn’t think so. I could be wrong.
Two cops conversed on the corner of Seventh and Central. Another directed traffic a block down. Still another scooted along the curb on a white kiddy-car, with a long chalk-stick, marking cars’ tires.
I reached the U-Rent-It place, bought myself a day’s worth of Ford sedan, color blue, and hit the road.
• • •
The pink Cadillac was parked in front of the Crafford residence. I pulled into the drive behind it and got out. The front glass door swung open. The man who’d been seated on the steps last night stood on the porch, frowning at me.
“Mr. Crafford?”
He nodded. He was bigger than I recalled, standing, with shoulders like a bear under the white jacket that looked as if it had been slept in. His shirt collar was unbuttoned. He had on a wrinkled pair of light blue trousers. His dark hair was longish and sparse, pink skull showing through. His face was meaty and mottled, the eyes sunken, harried, the mouth a broad straight line across the face like a knife gash that wouldn’t bleed. It was a mouth that would reveal very little of what went on inside the man.
I told him who I was.
“I’ve heard about you,” he said. He had been drinking, but not enough to count. He had the look of a lush.
He was going to ignore the fact that we’d more or less met last night. He brought out a curved-stem black pipe and stuck it in his mouth, chewing the stem.
“How well do you know your wife’s sister?” I said.
“If you expect to shoot questions at me, you may as well quit, right now.” He lifted the eyebrows tiredly, and lowered them as if they were too heavy for words. “If you get me,” he added.
