by Brewer, Gil
Barbara Penny. Fort Lauderdale. Thirty-three thousand.
Virginia Allsworth Kring. Boca Raton. Twenty-one thousand.
Vicki Amont. Miami. Thirteen thousand. Each time she was in Miami, she became faintly continental, chic, or downright supercilious in her choice of names.
Ruth Mary Allswell. Damned confident. St. Petersburg. Forty-three thousand.
Mimi Loveall. Venice. One thousand, two hundred.
Betty Smythe. De Land. Six thousand.
Marie Fitz-Simmons. Sarasota. Thirty-six thousand.
Margaret Dee Switz. She had glanced at her watch. Pahokee. Twelve thousand.
Nineteen different banks. Over four hundred thousand dollars. All of Florida searching desperately for that money. All of Florida well covered with it.
I stood up, retrieved the bank book I’d hurled across the room. I bundled them neatly together again, snapped the snappy pink garter around them, and dropped them into my pocket—or rather, stuffed them.
I checked her purse. I found a small silver bottle opener from the Mingo Club, in the shape of a dancing girl. Three pencil stubs, well worn with figuring the take, probably. Two lipsticks. A broken jade comb. A broken mirror. Two knotted handkerchiefs, one with three pennies tied in it. Some scraps of paper. A bent cigarette covered with her lipstick. A swizzle stick from some joint called The Silver Lagoon. A ribbon, a hank of hair….
I quit. I dropped the purse and got out of there.
I wasn’t sick. I was crazy.
TWENTY-FIVE
IN THE CAR, I looked at the hound. He opened one eye, yakked softly, wagged his tail, gaped with a crack, miffed and maffed, then closed the eye and went to sleep again. He snored faintly.
I thought back on things she had told me. The things ticked off in my mind like the fond sound of breaking pretzel sticks. Sometimes that’s how it is, when it’s raining outside, and growing dark, and you’re carrying nineteen bank books in your pocket.
I knew what I‘d been doing all this for. Getting myself fouled up and ready for the royal screwing. The one with the luscious auburn hair and the sad, winning smile, and the troublesome skirts, and the faintly-slanted dark blue eyes that could look at you and make you lose sleep.
That’s who I’d been doing it for.
My jaws ached with keeping my teeth clamped together so I wouldn’t yell.
I started the engine and drove across town without seeing a single cop.
I saw her in my mind’s eye. Running around Florida, popping into banks to start just one more savings account.
Planning for the future.
• • •
The pink Cadillac was nowhere to be seen at the Canawlside Drive address. I told the hound to stick where he was and ran across the lawn to the front porch.
The door chimes chimed delicately. A drape had been drawn across the entrance glass panels.
I left the porch after a moment, went around the side of the house, through dipping oleanders, jumping azealea bushes. I passed a clump of punk trees and stepped onto a broad patio. Half of it was enclosed by a screen. An archway led into the house. It was open. More glass doors.
Inside, I moved fast through the house. Nobody in the living room. Somebody had been doing some heavy drinking at the bar. Several bottles stood on the bar, opened; brandy and gin, mostly. Melting ice cubes were scattered across the thick carpet. The cubes weren’t far gone, indicating someone had been here shortly before.
I went upstairs. The rooms were debatable reading material, but deserted of human life.
Door chimes rang. Inside the house, the sound of the chimes was dreamy. They rang everywhere, musical and sweet The sound made me angrier than I was. I tried not to let it.
As I reached the head of the stairs, the chimes ceased. I ran fast along the broad landing on deep carpeting. At a large amber glass window in an arched alcove at the front of the house, I stopped, looked out.
It was the big guy, watermelon-puss; the same handler of skull-crushing .45's I’d had dealings with. Seeing him made my cracked knuckle ache. He was moving down across the lawn toward the curb.
The yellow Dodge sedan I’d swiped was parked down past the boundary of the Crafford lot. He didn’t give it a second glance. I saw nothing of the maroon Olds.
The guy opened the door and slid under the wheel of a light gray forty-nine two-door Ford sedan. For a moment I felt cool, then remembered Ivor Hendrix telling me about a similar car. I recalled something else and looked at the right front wheel of the Ford. The hubcap was missing.
I ran hard for the stairs, took them close to headlong, and struck the marble hall sliding. I ran for the front doorway. I got the first of the big glass doors swung open in time to see outside through a crack in the drawn drapes. The Ford pulled speeding away from the curb.
Outside, I made the Dodge, got it underway. I trailed in the direction the Ford had gone. It was no dice. He had flown. I drove around the nearby blocks, but saw nothing.
It was helplessness I felt now. The anger was turned against myself, precipitating bitterness and despair. It was as if the gods had strained all the fine, subtle futilities of the world through their suddenly partial sieve and packaged them for me, covered with godly gall, the very bitterest of all.
Then I thought of the dead. The late dead of my own concern—Yonkers, Ailings—and Vince Gamba. And they, too, were turned on the spit of futility, skull-grinning midst the ferocity of vanquished desires.
So she could have reasons too. Not just because it was four hundred thousand dollars. You could try to understand that, or you could let it go.
There was little left that wasn’t obvious to me, now. The one thing I couldn’t understand was how to dig myself free of this mess.
Because I could taste the earth against my teeth.
I drove toward Calcutta Shores.
• • •
The Yacht Club was deserted in the rain. The striped umbrellas on the lawn were folded down like the self-consciously lidded eyes of a whore’s mother who’d met a priest in the street. Beyond the gently streaming windows of the clubhouse I heard the melancholy tink and boop of ginned-up piano.
I walked along the pier until I reached the Carol.
“Knew you’d get here.”
Elk Crafford stood up there on the bow against the dark pall of sky over Tampa Bay. He held a bottle in one hand and a shotgun in the other. His eyes were menacing.
“You come up here,” he said.
He still wore the white dinner jacket, but with no shirt now, and a pair of red-striped pajama pants. He looked as if he’d been used as a sea-anchor on the Queen Elizabeth.
“You don’t need that gun,” I said.
“Hurry up,” he said.
I walked up the gangplank. He was very drunk.
“Say I don’t need this gun?” he said. “Don’t I, really? You trying to tell me I don’t need this gun?”
I stood four feet from him on the deck.
I said, “Yes. That’s right.”
His mouth sagged, slaver running from one corner. He cradled the gun in his left arm. His finger was on the trigger. It was an automatic. He dangled the bottle from his other hand by the neck, like a slain animal. Gravity on the bottle threatened to tip him over. He was a thoroughly practiced drunk, probably carrying six times the amount of alcohol an average man could stand up with.
“Oh, hell,” he said. He turned away. He took the shotgun in a backswing and hurled it straight up and out over the cabin of the Carol. I heard it splash in the bay.
My voice was distant. “Where’s Ivor Hendrix?”
He looked at me with hair falling in his eyes. “How hell do I know?”
I felt if I touched him I would kill him.
I shouted at him. “Where is she!”
He stared.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “I told you where she was. She’s gone. You’re the only one who knew. I found the key to the padlock right on the deck where you’re standing.
”
His head moved slowly back and forth. If he was acting, he deserved a stage. There was a sharp pain in my stomach; the old ulcer starting in again. I tried hard not to step in and hit him.
“Where’s your wife?” I heard myself say.
He pitched his head back and roared with angry laughter. His face got red. The veins choked with blood. The eyes bugged redly, like bleeding thumbs. He staggered violently backward, brought himself up sharply against the cabin. Something fell and broke inside.
“Thought I would fall, didn’t you?”
His articulation was good.
“I don’t care if you fall overboard and drown. Not at all.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s the right answer to that. Anybody would give me that answer.”
He drank moistly from the bottle. Some of it ran down his chin. He let his arm droop again. Whisky sloshed onto the deck.
“What key?” he said. “What padlock?”
“Where did your wife go?”
“You want a lay? That it?”
I said nothing.
He dropped his chin on his chest, watching me all the while.
“She’s not here,” he said.
“Not home, either.”
“Went downtown. Crazy wild insane bitch. I love her.” He looked at me. Tears sprang to his eyes. “I love her, you hear?” He wiped the tears with the back of the hand holding the bottle. Whisky spilled. “Crazy, isn’t it?”
“It’s understandable.”
He groaned quietly. “Don’t feed me any of that goddam crap.”
“She went downtown?”
He nodded, pointed, dropped the bottle. It smashed. Whisky streamed around the deck, reeking pungently. He stared at the puddle.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Got eight cases aboard. Matter at all.”
“Why do you have the gun?” I said. “Who were you expecting?”
“Christ,” he said. “I worked myself up to it. I thought I would have it out with him.”
He turned and fumbled along the cabin to the companionway, and fell through the hatch. He didn’t touch a step. He landed thickly. I looked down. He lay down there in a crumpled position, softly cursing. As I watched, he came to his knees, crawled to a bunk, pulled himself up and sat there with his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees.
I went down and looked at him. Just stood and looked at him.
He couldn’t keep his elbows balanced on his knees. They wobbled and slipped off. He would carefully place them back each time. They would slip, and his head jerked down. He gave that up. He sat there, hanging out over the bunk like the broken limb of a once-sturdy tree.
“Have it out with whom?” I said.
“Whom-diddy-whom-whom—whom—whom!” he said. “Bull-crap,” he said. He smiled unhappily at the deck.
“Have it out with whom?” I said.
“Bull-crap,” he said. “Ivor vanished,” he said. “Can’t see me for dust, anyway, no-how. Not really. Love her. Love two women. How you love two women? Sisters. One a whore and the other a—” He ceased.
“A what?”
“A lovely. A love. She gone anyway. ‘Oh, Elk,’ she say. ‘You are just a darling big old bear.’ She said that and I ‘dore her, the ground she walks on—all that crap. Love wife, too.”
“You’re getting pretty wild. Maybe you need a drink.”
“Prolly so.”
“I just came from your house,” I said. “As I was leaving, a gray forty-nine Ford sedan drove up. Had a missing hubcap on the right front wheel. Anybody you know drive a car like that?”
“Sure.”
“Who?”
“Me.”
Maybe I was too tired. I stared at him. I felt crazier than usual.
“You sure it might be your car?”
“Positive,” he said. “It is my car. Couldn’t be anybody else’s car but mine. How many gray forty-nine Fords have missing hubcaps right front wheel?” He waved his hand and nearly fell off the bunk. “If came to my home, then’s mine car. Isn’t that logical?”
“Anything could be logical right now,” I said. “Who drives it mostly?”
“Me. I drive it mostly. In fact, nobody else but me drives it. It keep it over at Vine Tree, use it as a fishing boat, I mean, fishing car. You know, lakes and rivers, rivers and lakes. Like to fish. By God, I think I’ll go fishing. Whyn’t you come fishing with me? We could….”
I said loudly, “Shut up!” I was nervous. I could hardly control my voice. I said as quietly as I could, “What’s this Vine Tree you mentioned?” I could remember Ivor Hendrix saying those words over the phone on this boat. Now he was saying them. She’d denied the words.
“My other place,” he said. “North side town. Call it Vine Tree, because there’s a big old tree with a vine hanging on it.” He started to laugh, belched instead. “Stomach burns,” he said. “Not eat enough. Reason.”
“Did you talk with Ivor on the phone this morning, when she was here on your boat?”
“Nah. She wouldn’t talk with me. I let her be.”
“Did you talk with her this morning? Try and remember. Did you talk with her and maybe mention Vine Tree?”
“No. Never, not me. Memory like elephant.”
She had told me she’d been talking with Elk.
“Listen,” I said. “Did you go down to see her at the Vista Groves Hotel? Where I told you she was?”
“No. Was—but I got drunk instead.”
“Did you tell anybody where she was?”
“Don’t think so. You asked me not to.”
“But did you maybe tell somebody?”
“Don’t think so.” He shrugged. “Might’ve.”
I was mad as hell now. The son-of-a-bitch sat there grinning and reeling and belching on the bunk.
“She’s gone,” I said. I said it very carefully. “She was taken away. By force.” I tried to play on this great goddamned love of his that he claimed he had for her. “The room was wrecked.”
He came reeling to his feet, lurched around, plowed into me, and fell down. He crawled around, then got back on the bunk and sat.
“Who did you tell?” I said.
I thought he would cry. “I don’t know. Honest, God.”
“Where’s Vine Tree?”
He gave me the address in the north side of town.
I said, “Try to remember if you told somebody about where she was. Try, for hell’s sake!”
He lurched to his feet and stood as solid as a tree. He shouted, “How do I know? I don’t know. Leave me alone, God damn it I can’t be trusted when I drink. The hell with it.” He turned and crashed to the other side of the cabin. He clawed into a cupboard and came out with a bottle of whisky. He turned to me, digging at the tape around the cap of the bottle.
“Get to hell off my boat. Insult me, you bastard. Go! I’m going sail Mexico today. Go fish off banks.”
I watched him. Tears welled thickly in his eyes. He tore the tape off the bottle and fumbled with the cap. He got that off. It rattled on the deck. He guzzled from the bottle. Whisky streamed down his chest and splashed on his feet.
He shouted, “Sail Mexico!”
I shouted back at him. “Bon voyage!”
I got out of there. As I reached the lawn at the end of the pier, I paused and looked back. Elk Crafford was reeling around on the pier, untying lines and heaving them at the Carol. He leaped up the gangplank. The schooner eased away from the pier on a swell. The gangplank gave way. He caught the rail, slung himself up onto the deck.
I turned for my car, stopped, then ran in a long diagonal, off across the yacht club lawn. A police cruiser nosed into the parking area. Probably this was a regular check-point for me. I cut out around the clubhouse, climbed a wire fence, ran through bushes to the yellow Dodge. I had parked it outside in the street.
I was scared now, and I didn’t like it.
I made the car, and drove off toward the north side of town.
T
WENTY-SIX
VINE TREE. The words were painted in white on an un-barked slab of oak. The small sign was mounted on a brass post.
I stopped the car. It was one of the oldest and wealthiest residential sections in the city. This particular lot must have encompassed ten acres. A fifteen-foot-high whitewashed cement wall, covered with shocks of green vine, slanted from partially opened mahogany gates. The gates had large black wrought-iron hinges and locks. It had probably been a beautiful estate back around twenty-five or six. It was pretty well run down.
I reached back and patted the hound, told him to stay put. He cracked a couple of yaks, wrinkled his snout, and went back to snoozing. I got out of the car and walked to the gate.
Beyond a meandering drive inside, I saw the house, rising through trees against a gray witch’s sky. It was like something off an old Gothic postcard.
Fresh tire marks showed in the worn gravel drive.
Probably this was the old Crafford estate. Elk had gone through the family inheritance, held on to this but had been unable to keep it up.
I moved fast, walking through the gate. I passed ancient gardens and marble pools, rock gardens, sundials, and tall urns containing sear, withered ferns. Oak, fresh saplings, straight hickorys, and uncared-for fruit trees; orange, key lime, grapefruit and wild cherry grew thickly. Willows leaned like pale dead hands above empty pools. Rain drove with winds across the treetops.
I heard the scream. It lifted, roofing the afternoon.
I ran toward the house.
Again the scream sliced through the chill rain. It hurt to hear it. It was a woman in pain.
I was still some distance from the house. It was surrounded by a thick clotting of shrubs and trees. It gutted toward the raining sky in a thrust of cupolas, windows, spires, and furious gingerbread. It was graced with two-foot black beams and the long, graceful galleries of the southland. Guest houses were set away from the main house. It was winged and multiroomed, immense and once-grand.
The scream again, more a throbbing yell of terror.
Then silence. I reached the house, swung up on a gallery railing and went to the house wall beside a tall window. I felt dwarfed. The windows were draped.
