The End of the Pier

by Martha Grimes

  He popped another can of Coors. “Oh, I’m not saying it’s coincidence. I guess I’m saying whoever’s doing these killings took advantage of Boy’s being loose.”

  Maud frowned and went back to pulling the cord. It illuminated and then plunged into darkness the edge of the dock where the black cat was snoozing. “That’s certainly possible, I guess. Do you know Chad said that?” When Sam looked at her, eyebrows raised, she nodded. “He did.”

  “Chad?”

  “Um-hm. He was talking about him a few weeks ago, down here. He was setting up the lamp for me and all the extensions . . .” She looked behind her.

  Impatiently, Sam prompted her to go on. “Why didn’t Chad think it was Boy like everybody else?”

  “Chad is not like everybody else.” She sighed and dug around in the ice for a cocktail onion, which she plunked in her glass before pouring a fresh martini. “I guess he’s like us.” And she sighed again, as if she, Sam, and Chad belonged to some alien race of folk who because of their greater perception and subtlety had to live beyond the fringes of ordinary society. “Did you know he met Boy Chalmers once?”

  “Hell, no, I never knew it. You never told me.”

  “That’s because I never knew it, until that weekend. Chad was riding that ancient bike out on the road to Hebrides—oh, way over a year ago, I think he said. One of the tires gave out, and Boy was coming along on his motorcycle. He stopped and fixed the tire. To do it, he had to go back to his bicycle shop and get a pump and patch, or whatever, but Chad said he was really helpful. He went to a lot of trouble.”

  “Why didn’t he ever tell you this after Boy was up for Loreen Butts’s murder?”

  She was pulling the little metal cord of the lamp. Off. On. Off. On. “He says he did. He says I forgot. But I didn’t forget. He just forgot to tell me. You know how he is.” She kept twitching the cord.

  “No, I don’t know how—will you stop fucking around with that lamp? A person would think you’d been living by gaslight all these years. You shouldn’t have a lamp down here, for Christ’s sake, Maud!”

  She looked at him evenly, said coolly: “Then tell me, how else can I read my book?” She lifted the book of poetry.

  “Read inside. I’m surprised Chad would help you set this up.” Sam turned and looked behind him. “You must have a dozen extensions trailing back there to the house. Have I ever seen anything so stupid!”

  “I don’t know. Have you?” Maud was reading her poem, mouthing the words silently and elaborately.

  Sam gritted his teeth. “You could have an accident. You could topple over into the lake and that lamp right on top of you.”

  Maud did not look up from her book as she replied, “I’ve often thought of going swimming with the lamp, yes.” Quickly, she reached up and tugged the cord. Off, on.

  He should sic her on Mayor Sims. No, Maud was only like this around him. And Chad, too. He drank his beer and looked over at her as she sat there pretending to read that poem, dramatically mouthing the lines and now fluttering her hands a little, just in case he wasn’t noticing that she was ignoring him. She turned a page. It rustled elaborately.

  Sam knew the reason he’d got on her case about the lamp, and knew the reason he was so irritable, was because it made him terribly nervous, Maud sitting out here alone for half the night, unprotected except when he could be here with her. “Go on about Boy Chalmers. What else?”

  “Chad didn’t say anything else.” She closed her book, a stage prop not immediately useful to her. “He just said he didn’t see how Boy could possibly have done these murders. Boy was just too fucking nice. Those were his exact words.” She looked meaningfully at Sam. “I don’t approve of people always saying ‘fuck this’ and ‘fuck that.’ It’s a word that should be used sparingly, if indeed at all. Some people must always resort—”

  Oh, shut up, Sam thought, listening to her ramble on about the impoverishment of the language. “Did Chad say anything at all else?”

  “No. But Boy must really have made an impression on him for him to believe he’s innocent when he’d rather not.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Chad would rather think he’s guilty.” Maud turned to him. “That would mean whoever’s guilty had been caught. For that would mean I’m out of danger.” She folded her hands in her lap and looked out over the lake with the most self-satisfied expression Sam could imagine. Chad worrying about her pleased Maud immensely.

  But she was right. Chad would certainly rather think the killer caught.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Yooo-rrr welcome,” she said, rolling her hair up the side of her head again.

  Smiling slightly, he leaned his head back and studied the night sky. “Wish we could all live in Mediterranea.” He felt her grow still, probably pleased he had remembered about her dream room.

  “The carabinieri probably don’t need a new loot.” She plucked the Popov bottle out again and held it up to check the vodka line.

  “I guess if you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, you’d take that room.”

  Looking disgusted, she forced the bottle back into the Colonel Sanders bucket and set her glass on the barrel.

  But he could nearly read her mind: she saw a game in all of this, the what-would-you-ask-for-if-you-could-have-anything game, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist.

  “Well, what would you ask for?” Her tone was as stepped-on as the singer over there whining about everything happening to him.

  “Depends.”

  The chair stopped rocking. “What do you mean, ‘depends’? If you could have anything you wanted, it doesn’t ‘depend.’ ”

  “Oh.” After a fumy silence in which the vocalist missed planes and got his letters shot back to him, Sam said, “Where would I be living when I asked for—whatever?”

  “What? . . . Anywhere, of course, if you can have anything . . .”

  Sam eased down in his chair and rolled the can of Coors across his forehead. “I’m thinking.”

  “Go ahead, then. Think.”

  Sam wanted to say “Key West.” But she’d read into that reply that he wasn’t taking the poem seriously, or her need to understand it. “New York.”

  Maud stopped rocking and sipping and banged down both chair and drink. “New York? Why in the name of god New York? You could live anywhere”—she stretched out her arms—“and you choose New York? Death Valley, the Mojave Desert I could understand . . .” She settled back again, her face turned to the black sky, and said, “But not New York.” Her mouth on the last word was like a little steel vise.

  “So now it appears I can’t live anywhere I want.”

  “I didn’t say that. Did I say that? Just be reasonable, will you?” She paused. “Why New York?”

  “Because I have a niece there. Her name’s Rosie.” Sam did not have a niece named Rosie. He had pulled her out of the air, walking down Fifth, probably because of the tune coming from some old wreck of a piano over there, and a drunken choir of voices: “You are . . . my heart’s boo-kaaay.” He felt, suddenly, a rush of nostalgia over this imaginary girl who had not even existed a minute before.

  Maud folded her arms across her chest, hard. Had she been standing, she would have looked like one of those hardy women in an old pioneer movie. “You never told me about Rosie.”

  “I don’t think about her all that much, I guess.”

  “Is she on your side or Florence’s?”

  “I don’t think she’s chosen up sides.” Sam checked his watch. One a.m. Florence would certainly be choosing up any other side but his.

  “You know what I mean. You’re just trying to irritate me.”

  Sam smiled. “Maybe. Rosie’s my brother’s girl.” Now he was inventing an entire family. It came from sitting around with Maud, who only touched down on Earth when she was working. He didn’t care; anything that would keep her talking was okay by Sam.

  Thump went the chair again as
she twisted her whole body around to glare at him. “What brother? You’ve only got a sister. That’s what you told me. Don’t you ever tell the truth?”

  Sam chewed his lip. “He’s a half-brother. Mom was married before she married my father. His name’s not even the same.”

  Maud started rocking again. “Half-brother. That makes Rosie hardly any relation at all.”

  It annoyed him, the way she discounted the niece who had just been born, streaked her way to eighteen or twenty, and was now walking down Fifth, looking in shop windows. He saw her as clearly as he would if he’d been the window dresser, seen her straight through the sun-sparkled glass. She had a filmy blondness that looked as if it were etched in sunlight. Wide blue lake-water eyes . . .

  “So, you haven’t yet said what you’d want most. Living in New York, that is. If you could have anything. A stretch limo, for instance.”

  Having turned Rosie into the merest wraith of a relative, Maud seemed a little content, tapping her fingers to the music. The guests were out on the patio again. If he squinted his eyes, he could make out a tiny figure dressed in blue with pale yellow hair. “Valet parking.”

  The cigarette she was raising to her lips dropped. “You’re supposed to choose the thing you want most. You’re not playing.”

  Sam yawned and slowly rose. “I am. Valet parking. This is New York, remember.”

  Maud tossed the cigarette into the lake. “Good God, you could have the Trump Tower if you wanted it.”

  “Then I’d really need valet parking. Listen: I want you to go in now. I don’t like you sitting out here all on your own in the dark. You never know what sort of weirdos are hanging around. I have to get home.” He was not going home; he meant to continue his rounds. Sam leaned over her, resting his hands one on each arm of her wooden rocker. “And unplug that goddamned lamp.” He walked away.

  “It’s Labor Day; it’s the last party. I’m sitting here and watching. And I don’t see why you have to leave. You’ve got late shift tomorrow, haven’t you?” Sam turned on the dock, looking at the back of her head, at the rigid way she held herself. Then she said, “She did write his name in her own blood.”

  Sam stood there for another moment and then went back to put his hand on her shoulder. “Are you talking about Nancy?”

  “That’s what they said she wrote: ‘Boy.’ ”

  “I don’t think she meant Boy Chalmers.”

  Maud looked up at him, squinting. “Who did she mean, then?”

  “Her son. Her little boy.”

  “What? You don’t mean you think he—?”

  “No, of course not. He’s only seven years old. No, I think she was trying to leave him a message. You knew Nancy, didn’t you? Didn’t she once work in the Rainbow for a while?”

  Maud nodded, staring up at him. “Washed dishes.”

  “Well, you remember she worked for us too, cleaning at night. We used to talk.”

  “In the Rainbow she’d never talk to anybody. I guess that’s not surprising—you’d end up talking to Shirl. She was so shy. Nancy, I mean. I tried to get her to talk. But she’d just keep her eyes on the dishes. It was terrible the way her husband must’ve beat her up. It was terrible they took the little boy away from her, as if it were all her fault.”

  “You know what she called him, Maud? ‘Dear boy.’ ”

  “Oh.” It came out a breathy, drawn-out “ooohh.” “Dear boy.” It seemed such a sadly old-fashioned way of speaking. Maud suddenly remembered her mother using it, often, when talking about her younger brother, Maud’s uncle. And he was dead now, too. He was dead of an aneurism; he’d fallen off a bar stool when he was barely forty-five. Everyone else thought this was funny; Maud hadn’t. Dear boy.

  “I believed her, the story she told about her son falling down the cellar steps. I was out at their house. Those steps were deadly. There was this big hook—lord knows what it was for—sticking out of the wall. The kid could easily have fallen and broken his arm on those steps. After all the other accidents that happened to the kid when that drunk of a husband was around—Rick Alonzo, what a deadbeat—I guess the social worker thought the boy’d be better off in a foster home. It was hard on her, really hard.”

  Hard? Maud could well imagine. It made her hold her breath even to think of it.

  Sam went on. “She’d be mopping the floor, wringing the mop out and talking about him. ‘Dear boy,’ she’d say.”

  Maud listened to the birdcall of the clarinet across the lake.

  “Billie Anderson nearly laughed me out of her office when I pointed out that I didn’t think Nancy had written anyone’s name. There was a smudge, another word in front. And that b wasn’t a capital B.”

  Maud felt a near-unbearable weight on her heart. “Oh, Sam. You think she wrote—”

  “ ‘Dear boy.’ ”

  They were silent for a long moment, Maud rocking, Sam standing there. Then he said, “I’ll see you later,” and walked off the dock.

  He heard her voice again, at his back, and turned and shook his head. What else, how else would Scheherazade keep him hanging around here?

  “I guess that means I can’t continue my story; I can’t tell you about the drowning.” She reached up and pulled the bead cord on the lamp. Its shaded glow threw a cone of dull amber over her hair.

  “What drowning?” His arms were crossed over his chest. He knew her.

  “Mine,” she said simply, reaching a languid hand toward her glass. “It happens quite beautifully in the molten sea beyond the room I was telling you about. Well, good night.”

  The molten sea, for Christ’s sake. “How do you drown in this vision?”

  In a stagy manner, she turned her profile to him. “I thought you had to go.”

  Sam stared at the moon and shook his head. “I can come back in about a half hour. Just to make sure you haven’t drowned in the molten lake. So give me a quick synopsis.”

  Maud cleared her throat as elaborately as a diva and said, still facing forward, “I don’t know how, but suddenly I find myself above the sea. It’s like a net of gold. The sun’s setting. I’m in this long, long dress of filmy gold, and I simply drop—no, I don’t drop—I sail gently down and I lie floating on the sea. I blend with it . . . my dress, my skin, because of the reflected sunlight, and it’s as if the sea closes over me, but you can’t tell the difference. I fit it. The sea, I mean.”

  She fell silent and he waited. Then she turned around and said, “I’m the perfect puzzle-piece.”

  For a few moments he stood there several feet behind her, frowning, feeling a chill. “Turn off that goddamned lamp and I’ll be back in a while.”

  FIVE

  He stood right off the path through the woods where she’d had to walk on her way home and breathed in the moist night air.

  What had delivered her into his waiting arms but the wish of his dear dead angel mother, to make up for the pain she’d caused him? She’d left her last letter to that bristle-bearded old man who’d done nothing but sit at the kitchen table and drink their money away.

  The queer had escaped from jail! It still made him snigger. The queer got out and gave him a perfect reason for doing it on that particular night, when he’d been hanging back because he thought it was too soon—too soon after the Butts woman.

  It wasn’t because he thought he was in danger. No, it was because he liked watching her.

  He liked watching her walk down Main, skittering along with her head down, her feet hardly touching the pavement. She was like a leaf, a pale brown leaf, thin and ribbed and blown about by any wind.

  He sighed, tonight, remembering.

  And remembering, he found the cold handle of the knife jutting up from his hip. He could almost hear the rustles in the woods that he’d heard that night in June when she moved along the path. Coming towards him.

  He leaned back against the tree, leaned his head back until his face was pointing upwards through the branches, his neck taut, as taut as hers had been. He ran his fi
ngers smoothly up and down, up and down, and felt the answering tautness below, could feel his jeans begin to strain.

  “Nancy.”

  He whispered it even now and could imagine her all over again.

  She’d started, out there in the unshadowed darkness, a dark so complete that only the stark whiteness of the ash trees in the cold moonlight could pierce it.

  And his eyes. But his eyes had burned out patches of these woods, turned the hard dry leaves beneath their struggling bodies to cinders.

  “Hullo, Nancy.”

  He heard her intaken breath, could see her fighting with the dark, trying to make out where the voice had come from. He giggled.

  She’d tried to yell, but it came out a gurgle that he simply reached out and cut off, one hand around her neck, dragging her body towards him. Before he drew out the knife, he would make her understand that he was master and she nothing more than a pitiful wood creature, a squirrel or a rabbit.

  He’d clamped his hand around her chin, squeezing her mouth up to his, felt his tongue like an asp darting, darting at her teeth as if he’d sting her to death.

  And then she was on the ground, both of her hands held as if roped by his one hand, and, dreamlike, the knife appearing in the other, cutting into her clothes, her flesh like butter, trailing straight down from her chin, and all the clothes fluttering and unresisting beneath the tip.

  As he plunged into her he shrieked. He felt the pure righteousness of it. Her eyes were hollow, white, turned back in her head as if she dared not look at his blinding eyes.

  He brandished the knife in the air and waited for her to recognize this world he had ushered her into.

  Her eyes stared up at him.

  He smiled and slit her throat.

  • • •