The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  “He’s just here on insurance,” Hanson said with no attempt at an introduction. “Tell you about it later.”

  “Let’s go fast, Mom,” one of the children said pleadingly.

  The woman waved her hand, gunned the engine and took off in a wide sparkling curve.

  “She never liked Lu,” Hanson said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mrs. Brye. They’re neighbors. She never cared much for Lu. I remember Lu saying Suey was trivial. What the hell did she expect Suey to do? Go picket the White House?” He turned and gave Stanial an absent nod. He looked at his watch. “Sorry I can’t help you, pal. I’ve got a tennis date. Got to sweat out the old before I pour in the new.”

  As Stanial was going down the stairs, Hanson called after him, “If you turn up anything, will you let me know about it?”

  “If you’d like.”

  “I’d like. Thanks.”

  Stanial went directly to the motel. Barbara was not in her room. He left the car and walked toward town and found her at the counter of the first small lunchroom he came to. After her start of surprise, her smile for him was quick and warm.

  After he had ordered and the counter girl moved away, he said in a low voice, “One unpleasant thing you can do, and probably pointless. Hanson has me tabbed as a cold-hearted bastard. You can enhance the image.”

  “Love to.”

  “Thanks. Stu and Lorna. Would that be the Keavers?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you called up to say you were lonesome, you’d get invited to cocktails and dinner. And when the gathering gets damp enough, you can start whining about me, and what I’m trying to prove. Then see if you can get Kelsey onto his thesis that even murder, absurd as it is, is more plausible than suicide. Get them all playing the game, if you can stand it.”

  “Paul! Do you really think any of those people …”

  “No. But they live here. We don’t. Two objectives. They may spread a little light on motive, without knowing it. Remember anything that doesn’t sound too insane. Tomorrow that conversation will spread all over town. And that might open something else up. Think you can do it?” She held her hand out, palm up. “What’s that for?”

  “For a dime for that phone over there.”

  She came back looking smug. “She said she was glad I called because it proved her phone was working again. Stu will swing by and pick me up about four-thirty on his way home, and bring me back when it’s over.”

  “If it gets out of hand, find a phone and call me at the motel and then go on out onto the road and I’ll pick you up.”

  “I’m competent, Paul. Now I have sort of a … hard thing to do. Kelsey said I could take care of Lu’s things, and if I came across anything I thought he might want, I could have it sent to him. I called Mrs. Carey and she said I could have the key any time. The things she had with her at that beach, they brought them from the court house and left them in the apartment. And her car is there. I talked to her lawyer about it, on the phone. Walter Ennis. He seems quite nice. He’s fixing it so I can get the money out of her checking account. There isn’t much, he says. A little over eighty dollars. And I’m to find the car title and give it to him, and the car keys, and he’ll sell it for me. I’m to separate the things to … be shipped home, and leave the rest and he’ll take care of it. But I do feel strange about going there, Paul.”

  “I’d like to look around too, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I hoped you’d want to.”

  “But I may have to leave you there and come back for you.”

  “That will be all right. Once I get started I’ll be all right.”

  “So let’s get started now.”

  Six

  Stanial had a two-thirty appointment with the man who had turned in the alarm about the possible drowning. The man and his family lived in a small pink cinder block house about two miles from Flamingo Lake. Children were whooping and racing and cycling through the streets and small yards. Willard Maple was a gaunt, hollow-chested man in his late twenties with large fading tattoos on both lean forearms. He was spraying shrubbery when Stanial drove up. They moved into the shade of the carport to talk.

  “The way it was, Mr. Stanial, I got off shift that day at twelve noon, and it was a hot one, and when I get home Peg says lets go on over to Flamingo Lake, and I says sure. But with the futzing around and having lunch first and her calling up her sister to find out we should pick them up too, we got there maybe twenty minutes to two, Pete and Em and their one kid, and the two of us and our three, all piled into that old station wagon of mine there. There’s three little roads to the lake and the way we do, if the first place is crowded we go along to the next one, and so on. But there was just the one car there, and so we agreed it was okay and I put the car in as much shade as I could find and we all come piling out and down to the beach with the gear. There was a stripedy towel spread, and a radio playing and a beach bag and woman’s sandals and nobody there. It wasn’t creepy right away. You don’t think much about it. The four kids didn’t mess up the beach because they all of them went racing off to look in the hollow stump where they’d hid some kind of treasure last time. Pete is sure it’s a couple and they gone back off in the bushes. But it was my Peg pointed out the foot marks, woman-size feet going on down to the water across that maybe ten foot of clean sand all dimpled from the hard rain. Then it did seem kind of spooky. We stared way out all around and not a head nowhere. We yelled separate and all the same time and listened and didn’t hear a thing. That’s when we shut the kids up so good they started crying, soft like. And by then we were talking soft. Pete said we’d look like pure damn fools we report a drownding and it turns out somebody came by in a boat and took her for a ride. But Em said she wouldn’t go off and leave her little battery radio running, would she? And that seemed to settle it. So Peg and me stayed and Pete went off in the wagon with Em and the kids and stopped at the Amoco station and phoned in it looked like some Mrs. Hanson had drownded and he told where. We knew the name from looking at a wallet sort of thing in the beach bag. So like we arranged, Pete left Em and the kids off to his house and came on back and made it fast enough to get here just ahead of the rescue people and the ambulance, but by then some of the gas station guys had come over and they’d told other people and we were getting a crowd, and this may sound like a terrible thing to say, but after getting the whole thing rolling like that, the thing I was most scared of was that damn fool woman coming walking along the shore and wanting to know what the hell was going on. Well, as they were getting set to get into action, there was a boat out there and a kid in a mask and flippers and the first thing you know that kid is yelling and everybody looked at him and he came a-sidestroking in towing something. They went down to meet him, and that was one husky kid, but as soon as he could stand up and take a good look at what he’d towed in, he ran a little ways and threw up. They put that oxygen thing on her for a little while, but from forty feet away you could tell it wouldn’t do a damn thing for that woman. They covered her and put her into the ambulance, and by then the little road was clogged up so good they played hell sireening their way out of there. The deputy said me and Pete should make a statement, on account of we reported it, so we left Peg off with her sister and the kids and went on to town to the Sheriff’s office and answered questions and signed what they wrote up. We haven’t none of us been back to that same place swimming and I don’t know as we ever will. A thing like that sure makes the damn water look different to you. When I think on it I can hear that little radio playing away, and her already dead under the water. I’ve told this enough times I don’t guess I left out a thing.”

  “You saw the bare footprints yourself?”

  “We all did, and looked at them close.”

  “Did she run into the water?”

  “No. I wouldn’t say so. She just set her stuff down and walked direct in, not fast and not slow I’d say. Steady walking, just five prints and the last one right at the
edge so the toes were washed out some.”

  “Is that the most popular of the three roads down to the shore?”

  “On account of more parking room and room to turn around easy. If there was, say, four cars there we might go along to the next one, but three or less and there’s room enough. And it’s better sand there. Guys trailer their boats in and launch them there sometimes.”

  “You didn’t notice anybody turning out of that road as you were approaching it?”

  “It’s a straight stretch along there and I would have noticed anybody coming out of any one of those three little roads, because when you’re wondering how crowded it is you notice things like that.”

  “Here is a rough sketch of the little beach, Mr. Maple. Would you please draw in where the towel was, the radio and the beach bag and her car?”

  “You fellas really go into things thorough. The car was here, nosed up to a tree that’s right here, sort of on the left part of the beach. The towel was spread out neat and flat right here. And the beach bag here on some grass at the edge of the sand, and the radio leaning against it, with the radio and the beach bag in the shade of this here same tree. The sandals were right here beside the towel, one standing up and the other across it upside down, like she kicked them off careless.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Maple. You’re very observant. This is a lot of help.”

  “No help to her,” Willard Maple said. “As Peg says, if she’d decided earlier and fixed a lunch, we could have been there before twelve-thirty, and I can swim good enough to haul somebody out if they weren’t too far from shore, and she wasn’t far out at all. Forty to fifty feet at the most. But all the ifs you can string together won’t change anything already over and done.”

  When Stanial called Kimber’s office the third time, Miss Powell said he could stop by at six o’clock, and he might have to wait but it shouldn’t be a long wait. Stanial got back to Lucille’s apartment at exactly three-thirty. Barbara was being resolutely casual, but Paul could sense the strain she was under. She was at the kitchen table with a metal lock box and a jewelry case.

  “There’s more sorting to do than I thought. I’ll have to finish it up tomorrow, I guess. This was in the closet and there was a key in the jewelry case that fit it. Here’s the car title for Mr. Ennis. And her personal papers. What’s this, though? Is this the investment thing Mr. Kimber found for her?”

  He looked it over. “It’s her copy of a partnership agreement. And this shows she has a one-twelfth undivided interest in a warehouse lease held in the name of the partnership.”

  “She was getting ninety dollars a month. What happens to that?”

  He located the appropriate clause in the partnership agreement. “The other partners buy it back for what she put in it. Seven thousand.”

  “And who gets that?”

  “You didn’t find a will, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess Hanson is the one who gets it.”

  “Golly, that doesn’t seem fair!”

  “Maybe he won’t want it. You should turn these documents over to Ennis, too. He’ll want to get some kind of a release from Hanson, I’d think.”

  She pushed a wedding ring and an engagement ring across the table toward him. “And these. I think the diamond is good.”

  He picked it up, remembering the elements of a two-hour police seminar in gems. One carat, he estimated. A deep cut, a pure white.

  “Very good, probably.”

  “Should I give it back to him?”

  “Why ask me, Barbara?”

  “I hate this sort of thing. Greed, I guess. So I want to make sentimental gestures. But, damn it all, there’s really very little stuff here worth anything. When she left him, she left behind the things he’d bought her. And the wedding presents that came from his friends. She was like that. She still hadn’t decided whether she was going to ask for alimony. She had so much pride. Maybe that’s my problem, too. Too much pride. I want to send him his stinking diamond back, but what if I could get a thousand dollars for it? The medical bills on my mother have been sickening. And they can get worse.”

  “So keep it.”

  Her smile was wan. “That was the nudge I needed. Thanks. The wedding ring can go back to him. It’s initialed inside. And those look like good little stones, too. The compromise gesture. My life is full of them. And here’s a batch of photographs I guess he should have. And, for his trophy case, the marriage certificate. I might as well take this stuff with me tonight and get it over with. She rented this place furnished. There won’t be much to ship back home. A couple of good pieces of luggage, some silver, some of the clothing.”

  “When you get it ready, I’ll take care of shipping it.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll just take it back with me and pay the overweight if there is any. I guess I’ll have to tell that Mrs. Carey I’ll be back tomorrow. And she’ll make a big production about letting me in again.”

  “Didn’t she give you a key?”

  “There’s only one.”

  “Where’s the one your sister had?”

  “I couldn’t find any.”

  He frowned for a moment and then went and looked at the front door to the apartment. It was of the type that has to be locked with a key upon leaving.

  “What’s the matter, Paul?”

  “I don’t know. She would have taken the key to the lake.”

  “It isn’t on her car keys and it wasn’t in the beach bag or her purse.”

  He picked up the phone. It was dead.

  “When you think of it,” Barbara said, “it is sort of strange.”

  “I guess Sheriff Walmo must have kept it. But I’d like to ask him.”

  After he had left Barbara off at the motel to change for the party at the Keavers, he phoned Walmo.

  “Is this line private, Sheriff?”

  “Go right ahead, Mr. Stanial.”

  “As part of your procedure, Sheriff, did you make an inventory of the Hanson woman’s belongings you gathered up at the lake?”

  “Well, not real detailed. I mean not down to the lipstick in the purse and all that. But the money went on there. Six dollars and some change. And the little radio and such.”

  “Was there a house key?”

  “Come to think of it, no, there wasn’t. I did look for one.”

  “Didn’t you think there should have been?”

  “Lots of people don’t lock a door around here all year round.”

  “I checked with Mrs. Carey. Lucille always locked the place up when she left. You have to lock it with the key. There’s no snap lock. Can you remember if she left her car keys in her car at the lake?”

  “Hold on just a minute.” When Walmo came back on the line he said, “That’s where they were. Two car keys and two other keys on a split ring. But neither of the other two keys fit her apartment door. I just don’t know what they fit.”

  “Probably one of them fits Doctor Nile’s office. Mrs. Carey is quite certain Lucille kept her house key on that ring. She was with Lucille a couple of times when she unlocked her door.”

  After a long silence Stanial heard Walmo’s long exhalation. “I wouldn’t want you should try to make something out of damn near nothing, Stanial.”

  “I don’t want to. But I would like to know where that key went. As you can see, Sheriff, it enlarges the area of possible motive.”

  “If she had something worth taking. I can tell you somebody hasn’t got that key. Sam Kimber. Day after she died he talked me into giving him a note to Miz Cary to let him in there to pick up some private papers he said she’d been working on. Far as I know he did just that. He picked them up.”

  “Or said he did?”

  “Business slow out of your office this time of year?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you have to have every little thing explained, you could keep this going a long time. Maybe there’s some good explanation about that key. You sure you know the rules of evidence?”<
br />
  “Sheriff, I didn’t make this contact to tell you I had anything worth re-opening your investigation. I just called to ask a question. When I do have anything, I will certainly let you know.”

  “You do that.”

  After Stanial hung up, he stretched out on his motel bed and examined the fragility of the structure of supposition he was erecting. X was the unknown quantity, the drowner. He was asking quite a bit of X. He had to be in a position to know that Lucille had something of value in her apartment. He had to follow her to the lake, or make a date to meet her there. He had to drown her without leaving a mark on her or on the sand, then know which of three keys that were not car keys to take off the key ring, having previously figured out how to get in and out of the apartment without being seen. But to take something from the apartment, was it necessary to drown the woman beforehand? Only if, after it was taken, she was the only one who would know who took it.

  Or, there could have been no planning at all, murder on impulse and the rest of it improvised, benefiting from luck.

  A key that disappeared was stolen, borrowed or lost. Or taken from her effects afterward. Or Kimber’s request to enter the apartment could have been a false trail, a monstrous deviousness.

  In the past he had built structures more solid than this one and had discarded them because they did not feel right. They were contrived, and could lead only to absurdity. But this seemed right. It made the back of his neck tingle. And that, he thought, is one remarkable investigative tool—a responsive neck.

  And maybe the key had been a symbol to her of everything that had gone wrong with her life, and so she had hurled it into the brush before swimming out, floating, steeling herself to that final effort of rejection, that first, convulsive inhalation of lake water.

  Most murder was made of other materials. Most murder was somebody dazed, sitting in a crowded bloody kitchen, mumbling they didn’t mean to do it.

  You could not get emotionally involved with that. You just did what had to be done as quickly as you could, the way you hold your breath and clean up a dog’s mess.