The End of the Pier

by Martha Grimes

  “No, I don’t guess so, Wade. Well, I’ve got to be going.”

  They said good night, and Sam walked off across the hard dirt yard lit only by a cold half-moon.

  FOUR

  “I wonder where they go when the summer’s over,” said Maud, trying to stretch two fingers farther into the narrow olive bottle, scissoring them around an olive that kept falling back. Besides the cut-glass olive dish there was a little plate of lemon twists and cocktail onions. And a garlic clove. It was always there, and Sam knew she was waiting for him to ask about it. He didn’t.

  “Far as I know, Raoul and Ev—”

  Her head turned quickly to Sam. “I didn’t say I wanted to know, did I?” Irritated that he might tell her, still she was glad Sam was back. It was nearly midnight; the party across the lake usually crested around now, and she was getting depressed. Getting? Wasn’t she always? No, this was different; it was superficial, even facile depression, a relief from the real thing.

  “You said,” said Sam, the fresh beer balanced on the arm of the folding chair, “ ‘I wonder where they go.’ ”

  “That’s wondering. Wondering is totally different from wanting to know. Like wondering about their names. You told me their names. When I said ‘I wonder what their names are,’ I didn’t actually mean I wanted to know.” She would much rather run a few possible names through her mind, pick one, discard it, start the process over again. Knowing the last name (which she didn’t, but she suspected Sam did) would be entirely too real; last names pinned you right down to a phone book, a street, town, city, country. And, of course, if the name was ordinary, that could be near fatal to her fantasies about the people who owned the house across the lake. “Raoul.” That wasn’t the real name, she was sure—pretty sure. Sam had let the first names pop out, and when she’d reacted with a mild kind of violence (knocking the lamp over), he’d smiled rather slyly and retracted. Or half-retracted: he’d asked her if she really believed “Raoul” and “Evita” could possibly be the real names of the couple over there. Sam was very quick, though; very quick. He could have pretended he’d just made the names up in order to hide the fact he’d revealed them.

  The thing was, she rather liked the names, and she imagined they very well could be real, given the Hollywood glamour going on over there. She was afraid of their real histories—God only knew she didn’t want to find out they lived in Yonkers or even Manhattan. And what if they came from some palsied mid-sized city like Omaha? What if they had a regular house on a regular street in Des Moines? No one named “Raoul” or “Evita” could possibly be a full-blooded American, though, and therefore they would probably drive off a cliff before they’d live in Des Moines. She didn’t want to know the real histories of the owners, or even the guests, because she was afraid of their possible mediocrity. Her imagination could really go to town working up ports of call for Raoul and Evita.

  A few times there had been complaints, she’d heard, about noisy parties “over there,” but Sam, with his customary delicacy, had refrained from identifying the culprit house. Anyway, it was no more than drunken cavorting in the driveway—which Maud couldn’t see and which, consequently, didn’t exist for her. God knows she had nothing against drinking, as long as the glasses were perfect, the gestures of raising them elegant.

  Sam had said, with that eerie perception he sometimes displayed, that he hadn’t intended to give away their names. “You don’t even know but what I made them up, do you?” and he’d looked out over the moonstruck lake with that tiny smile . . .

  • • •

  “Sorry,” said Sam, who actually did know where they lived, and did know their names, although he had very little contact with the summer people, the ones who owned the quarter-million spreads on the other side of the lake. He drove around back there sometimes in the dusk and marveled at these houses, at the way they had tucked themselves, architect-designed and long and low, into the landscape, burrowed there like moles. Big as they were, they had surprised his eye, separating from their camouflage of trees, plants, and shrubs only if he looked closely.

  Maud didn’t have to worry about reality barging in from over there, jumping off the dock swimming towards her, waving, yelling, singing, drowning. If she ever drove along the old roads on the other side she would find them just as dreamy.

  He had thought up “Raoul” one night after he and Florence had been to La Porte’s single movie house to see Kiss of the Spider Woman. The name “Raul Julia,” Sam thought, had got to be about the best in the book if a person wanted to conjure up exotic, mysterious people and settings. What a name! It was definitely a Mother Grizzell name. Ma Gris would absolutely make a meal of that name. He wondered if the two of them were still in that trailer, sitting as they’d sat a year ago. Perhaps she’d died. For all of her wiry aggressiveness, she hadn’t looked all that strong to him.

  The “Evita” he’d stumbled on when he’d been flipping through the chrome jukebox menu of numbers in the Rainbow Café and found “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” Evita Perón. He’d thought “Evita” went extremely well with “Raoul.” It was a marriage made in heaven.

  God knows it was better than their real names, ordinary as La Porte names. Maud would have fits.

  • • •

  “It’s all right,” Maud said, giving her attention to the olive jar and finally loosening up the one that was wedged in, so that all the olives rolled out into the olive dish. From across the lake came the jumpy sounds of “Anything Goes.” There was a little stirring of the guests. Some had come out to the patio, and she loved the daubs of color the gowns of the women made, even though the distance and the lantern light muted them, blueing the greens, or the greens yellowing the blues. In other words, she admitted to herself, you can’t really tell. It was too dark to see such mutations; the patio was like a little chartreuse island.

  They sat in silence, Sam humming a few bars of the music, smoke drifting up from his cigarette.

  She was glad he’d come back before going home. Often, she wondered about his wife, Florence, who occasionally came into the Rainbow to buy pastry or order a cake for a special occasion. Maud had never talked to her; Shirl always waited on her up there by the cash register. Florence was quite good-looking, she thought, in a smoldering, Italian way. Sam had smiled and said she was second-generation Greek.

  She also wondered where he went on these nightly excursions (“just to check on things”) around La Porte. Did he circle the lake and drive past the backs of those houses over there? Probably not. But he could be gone for two, three hours, and although he’d said he was going to Wade Hayden’s, she couldn’t really imagine sitting around with Wade Hayden for over two hours.

  This was not because she disliked Wade. She didn’t even know him except to see him behind the counter in the post office, where he would always say, “ ’Lo, Maud” and “ ’Bye, Maud,” with nothing much happening in between. His smile would be reserved as he’d stamp a package “Priority Mail” that she’d be sending to Chad. He was very remote. Reserved and remote. Maud wanted to laugh. Beside her, Wade Hayden was probably Times Square. They should have got on like a house afire, standing there together on opposite sides of the counter.

  She’d forgotten about that poor girl of his, Eunice, and the sudden memory brought the rocking chair down with a small thud.

  Sam turned and looked at her. “Something wrong?”

  “I just remembered Eunice Hayden. I swear, but I just can’t put that together. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Does murder ever?” Sam picked up the binoculars and fiddled with them.

  “Well, of course. Take Detroit or Chicago or New York City. There it makes sense. The very senselessness of it makes sense.”

  “You’ve lost me.” Sam turned the binoculars over. “Zeiss. These are good. Where’d you get these?”

  “In the attic. But listen: that’s what those places—I mean Detroit and New York, for instance—are like. Killings are part of the puzzle. But n
ot here. It’s like someone took a piece from the wrong puzzle, a piece of blue sky, maybe, and forced it into a black pavement. Thumped it right in, I mean. And spoiled the whole design.”

  “Maud, for lord’s sake, what’s the difference? You can’t force a piece of sky into a New York street, either.” He adjusted the focus.

  Her fist curled and her eyes squeezed shut. He recognized the signs of a snit coming on.

  “The sky’s always falling in the gutters of New York. And don’t be so damn literal.” The eyes opened and the fingers mauled around in the jar of olives. “I hate it when the pimento gets out.” She tossed the bruised olive into her glass and pulled the bottle from the ice. “Now this”—and Maud made a sweeping motion with the Popov bottle—“makes sense. There’s the lake, the moon over it, and the little boats; there’s us on the end of the pier; and there’s the party across the water. The arrangement is perfect.” She made a circle with her thumb and index finger.

  Binoculars raised to his eyes, Sam said, “Um . . . Well, there’s some people wouldn’t agree it’s perfection.”

  Maud gave him a soppy smile. “That comment is beneath you. What are you doing with my binoculars? Put them down!”

  Sam dropped them, and they dangled on the narrow black strap. “For Christ’s sake, that’s what they’re for. Distance. What do you do with them, count your toes?”

  Maud started rolling her hair up the side as if the lake were her mirror. She knew the gesture irritated Sam. “The rule is, we’re not supposed to see the party up close.”

  Sam sighed. “The rule. You just made that up.”

  With feigned sweetness, Maud said, “I never needed it before. The rule is, you do not try and see the people over there any closer than you can see with your naked eye. I don’t know why, so don’t ask me. It’s the rule. I think it’s because—” Maud stopped to sip her drink and stir the glass flamingo—“it would spoil the design. It would break it all up.” She gazed up at the night sky. “The moon would crack, the lake would shatter like glass, the patio would tilt, and the pier would collapse.”

  For a moment Sam looked at her. “That is certified shit.”

  As if there were crumbs in the lap of her skirt, she brushed it smoothly, slowly. “That is because you are blind. You can’t see anything if it isn’t in perfect focus.”

  Sam swung the binoculars from around his neck and set them on the pier. He pulled a Coors from the bucket, snapped the cap. At least she’d got off the subject of Eunice Hayden. So he was, really, pleased to sit there and listen to her ramble on about some fucking room or other she’d seen in a vision.

  “I didn’t say ‘vision.’ I’m not clairvoyant—which is one of my favorite words. It’s musical. . . . Anyway, I was talking about a room in my imagination. I keep seeing it. It must be in Spain; there are Spanish tiles on the floor. Or in Mediterranea. The weather—”

  Sam’s head snapped up. “ ‘Mediterranea?’ There is no such place.”

  She sighed and dropped her head in her hand. “I mean, as any fool could tell, any country or place around the Mediterranean Sea. God, can I just tell about this room?”

  “Shoot.”

  “The weather is fine. I mean, it’s not just sunny; it’s silky or gauzy. There’s a bed with an iron frame, and a big wardrobe, and a wooden chair pulled up at a sort of dressing table. Peachy-shaded powder is spilled a little over the table. One of those old Pond’s powder boxes is sitting on the glass . . . though probably in Mediterranea you can’t buy it. The curtains are as translucent as chiffon and billow around the window that looks over the sea. There’s a small wrought-iron balcony that I can walk out on—I wear a loose dress and I’m barefoot—that I can walk out on and look out over the sea. The sea is the color of jade until the sun starts setting and tosses this dazzling scarf of light over it at six o’clock and turns it to topaz. At night it’s grape-colored. And it’s always moving. I can’t see the waves breaking on the shore because my room is very high up; but I can see the waves barely forming out there in tiny wrinkles. At night if the moon is very bright, which it usually is, I can see narrow bands of white foam, just a ruffle of white.” Maud stopped to take a cigarette from his pack and tamp it down. She had her own, but she enjoyed filching his.

  “Is the ice bucket on the balcony?”

  She squinted past the blue flame. “What?” Then she looked around at the tub and frowned as if it were some newfangled thing tilting precariously on the end of the pier. “No,” she snapped. “If there was an ice bucket I’d have said.”

  Dangerous waters, but Sam stroked through them. “Well. It was only because the place sounded a little like here . . .”

  Her eyes were as wide and wild as a gazelle’s as she swept them over the scene around her. “Here? Here? Well, fortunately not. The polizia don’t go around arresting the wrong people in Mediterranea.” The rocking chair thumped back, and she smoked in quick little jabs.

  Sam was wary. “What’re you talking about?”

  “As if he didn’t know. Those women raped and murdered. Nancy Alonzo and Loreen Butts and the other one.” She looked at Sam. “That Chalmers fellow you arrested—”

  “Boy Chalmers. And I didn’t arrest him—the police in Hebrides did that. And the mayors in both towns were extremely pleased. Not to mention the state’s attorney.” Maud was rocking the chair gently to the rhythm. “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You.’ Can you imagine? Remember Dorothy Lamour? Someone told me she lived in Baltimore, Maryland . . .”

  “You certainly know the right thing to wear . . .” Maud sang. She had a light, sweet voice that put Sam in mind of a tall, pastel summer cooler—the sort of thing you held sitting on white wicker on a wide green lawn . . . Christ, he was getting as bad as her.

  “She wore hibiscus in her hair. Dorothy would be better off in my room than in Baltimore. I wonder if she sells real estate. I think someone told me she did.” Maud shook her head. “That doesn’t fit, either.”

  Although she appeared to have forgotten about Boy Chalmers and the rape-murders, Sam knew she hadn’t. Maud rarely forgot any of the threads of her conversation, any more than Odysseus’ wife—what was her name?—would have given up weaving that endless tapestry. “Tell me some more about the room. It’s interesting.”

  “Why should I?” She sang a few more words:

  What a night to go dreaming,

  Mind if I tag al-looooong . . .

  “Well . . . I’ll tag along to your room.” He thought of Florence. Had she been out going dreaming with Bubby Dubois? How could anyone go dreaming with him?

  Maud’s voice came through the image of that blubbery body humping his wife. Her sly voice. “Why don’t you ask me if there was anyone else in the room?”

  Better sly than hurt, so Sam said, “Okay. I’m asking.”

  Maud stilled the rocking chair and leaned over the arm, closing in. “Nooo.” Now it was sly sweetness. “Nooo. There’re no chairs on my balcony, so I’m not sitting out there looking over the water with some knuckle-brained, ham-fisted member of the polizia.” In a grand gesture, she made a curve with the hand that held her martini glass and the liquid went flying out, sparkling the air, as if she were baptizing the pier. “Shit,” she said, looking into its emptiness.

  “Sounds like your room’s in Venice.” It appeared to be a neutral comment, but he just couldn’t keep the fecklessness out of it. He knew well enough that she didn’t want to qualify her room or place it anywhere in particular beyond its Mediterraneal bearings. He knew she was looking up at him from under the veil of her hair. “Because of the water,” he said. He was really more interested in why she was so sure Boy Chalmers was the wrong man. Probably just to be pig-headed.

  “It most certainly is not.” She grabbed the vodka bottle and wrung another drink out of it. “There’s no jade sea around Venice—at least not in the postcard I saw of it. And, anyway, Venice is on the Adriatic.”

  Anyone who didn’t know that was surely too witless to be the re
pository for her great dream. “Oh. Well, I guess I’m not swell enough for Mediterranea. Or even Adriatica.” Sam stretched out his legs and dropped the mirror-sunglasses down from their resting place on top of his hair. “So tell me why you think Boy Chalmers is innocent.”

  “Who?”

  He had interrupted her fantasy-telling, and now she was going to be difficult. “The wrong man. The wrong man I arrested.”

  She had herself picked up the binoculars now and was training them across the lake. He knew she would refuse to talk about Chalmers unless he noticed what she was doing. And commented. Sam sighed. “Well, you’re breaking your own rule, aren’t you? Didn’t you just say we’re not supposed to be looking through the binoculars?”

  “I’m not.”

  If he didn’t know Maud so well, he’d’ve thought she was drunk silly. But she was never drunk, just silly. Sam stared up at the black sky. He was tempted not to comment, but he supposed he’d have to. “You’re not. But you’re looking right through those binoculars.”

  “My eyes are closed.”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake, her eyes are—Sam couldn’t stand it; he reached out and wrenched them from her grip. Which was, of course, just what she wanted—to drive him to distraction. She was smoothing out her skirt and humming “Moonlight Becomes You.”

  As he wound the strap around the binoculars and then set them on the dock, he said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me why you think the Chalmers kid didn’t do it.”

  Dignified silence reigned.

  “Maud?”

  Making a long sausage curl of her hair, she rolled it slowly up above her ear. She knew it annoyed him, which is why she did it.

  “I’d really like to hear what you think. Since we seem to be the only ones who think it. Sims thinks I’m nuts.”

  He must have hit just the right mendicant-on-the-street-corner note. “He’s the nut. An alcoholic old nut who shouldn’t ever be mayor.” She stopped in the act of pulling the little beaded cord of the lamp off and on, off and on, as if she’d just discovered the wonders of electricity. “He hates you because if you ever ran for mayor, you’d win. Still, I hate to say it, but it would be just too much of a coincidence that on the very day Boy escapes from prison there’s another murder.” She looked at Sam, worried.